7225 




PROSERPINA, 



STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS 



WniLE THE AIR WAS YET PURE 

AMONG THE ALPS. ASD AV TllliJ SCOTLAND AND 
ENGLAND WHICH MY FATHER KNEW. 



JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D., 

nONORARY STCDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPVS 
CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD. 



VOL. 11. 



NEW YORK: 

JOHN WILEY & SONS, \^. 

15 AsTOR Place. ^'^ 

1888. 







TBAMSFSB 
Sk O. FUBLIO LIBIUlB? 
SBPT. lO. 1840 



PROSERPINA. 



CHAPTER I. 



VIOLA. 



1. Although I have not been able in the preceding 
volume to complete, in any wise as I desired, the account 
of the several parts and actions of plants in general, I 
will not delay any- longer our entrance on the examina- 
tion of particular kinds, though here and there I must 
interrupt such special stady by recurring to general 
principles, or points of wider interest. But the scope of 
such larger inquiry will be best seen, and the use of it 
best felt, by entering now on specific study. 

I begin with the Violet, because the arrangement of 
the group to which it belongs — Cytherides — is more ar- 
bitrary than that of the rest, and calls for some immedi- 
ate explanation. 

2. I fear that my readers may expect me to write 
something very pretty for them about violets : but my 
time for writing prettily is long past ; and it requires 
some watching over myself, I find, to keep me even 



2 PROSERPINA. 

from writing querulously. For while, the older I grow, 
very thankfully I recognize more and more the number 
of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world, I 
recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper 
to anything that interferes with them ; and a grievous 
readiness to hnd fault — always of course submissively, 
but very articulately — with whatever Nature seems to 
me not to have managed to the best of her power ; — as, 
for extreme instance, her late arrangements of frost this 
spriug, destroying all the beauty of the wood sorrels ; 
nor am I less inclined, looking to her as the greatest of 
sculptors and painters, to ask, every time I see a narcis- 
sus, why it should be wrapped up in brown paper ; and 
every time I see a violet, what it wants with a spur ? 

3. What any flower wants with a spur, is indeed the 
simplest and hitherto to me unanswerablest form of the 
question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow in spires, 
and are crowded together, and have to grow partly 
downwards, in order to win their share of light and 
breeze, one can see some reason for the effort of the 
petals to expand upwards and backwards also. But that 
a violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might 
grow straight up, if she pleased, should be pleased to do 
nothing of the sort, but quite gratuitously bend her 
stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by her 
waist, as it were, — this is so much more hke a girl of the 
period's fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one 
separately but with renewed astonishment at it. 



I. VIOLA. 3 

4. One reason indeed there is, wliieh I never thouglit 
of until this moment ! a piece of stupidity which I can 
only pardon mj^self in, because, as it has chanced, I have 
studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild haunts, 
— partly thinking tlieir Athenian honour was as a garden 
flower; and partly being always Ted away from them, 
among tlie liills, by flowers which I could see nowhere 
else. Witli all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is 
shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me 
before, or at least this bit of the truth — as follows. 

5. The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as 
growing in meadows (or dales). But the Greeks did so 
becaucc they could not fancy any delight except in 
meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to 
nightingale — and, after all, was London bred. But 
Viola's beloved knew where violets grew in Illyria, — and 
grow everywiiere else also, when they can, — on a hank, 
facing the south. 

Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are 
meadow flowers, the \nolet is a hank flower, and would 
fain grow always on a steep slope, towards the sun. 
And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when grow- 
ing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower, 
— not at all, in any strain of modesty, hiding itself, 
though it may easily be, by grass or mossy stone, 'half 
hidden,' — but, to the full, showing itself, and intending 
to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost 
of its soft power. 



4- PROSEEPII^rA. 

Nor merely in its oblique setting on the stalk, but in 
the reversion of its two upper petals, the flower shows 
this purpose of being fullj seen. (For a flower that 
does hide itself, take a lilj of the valley, or the bell of 
a grape hyacinth, or a cyclamen.) But respecting this 
matter of petal-reversion, we must now farther state two 
or three general principles. 

6. A perfect or pure flower, as a rose, oxalis, or cam- 
panula, is always composed of an unbroken w^horl, or 
corolla, in the form of a disk, cup, bell, or, if it draw 
together again at the lips, a narrow-necked vase. This 
cup, bell, or vase, is divided into similar petals, (or seg- 
ments, which are petals carefully joined,) varying in num- 
ber from three to eight, and enclosed by a calyx whose 
sepals are symmetrical also. 

An imperfect, or, as I am inclined rather to call it, an 
' injured ' flower, is one in which some of the petals have 
inferior office and position, and are either degraded, for 
the benefit of others, or expanded and honoured at the 
cost of others. 

Of this process, the first and simplest condition is the 
reversal of the upper petals and elongation of the lower 
ones, in blossoms set on the side of a clustered stalk. 
Wlien the change is simply and directly dependent on 
their position in the cluster, as in Aurora Regina,* modi- 
fying every bell just in proportion as it declines from 
the perfected central one, some of the loveliest groups of 
* Vol. i., p. 212, note. 



I. VIOLA. 5 

form arc produced which can be seen in any inferior 
orj^anisni : but when the irregularity becomes fixed, and 
the flower is always to the same extent distorted, what- 
ever its position in the cluster, the plant is to be rightly 
thought of as reduced to a lower rank in creation. 

7. It is to be observed, also, that these inferior forms 
of flower have always the appearance of being produced 
by some kind of mischief — blight, bite, or ill-breeding ; 
they never suggest the idea of improving themselves, now, 
into anything better; one is only afraid of their tearing 
or pufting themselves into something worse. l*fay, even 
the quite natural and simple conditions of inferior vege- 
table do not in the least suggest, to the unbitten or un- 
blighted human intellect, the notion of development into 
anything other than their like : one does not expect a 
mushroom to translate itself into a pineapple, nor a 
betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a snapdragon to 
soften himself into a lilac. 

8. It is very possible, indeed, that the recent phrenzy 
for the investigation of digestive and reproductive oper- 
ations in plants may by this time have furnished the 
microscopic malice of botanists with providentially dis- 
gnsting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for 
every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, 
freckle, filth, or venom, which can be detected in the 
construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegeta- 
ble organism. ' But with these obscene processes and 
prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar cf 



6 PROSERPINA. 

flowers has nothing whatever to do. I am amazed and 
saddened, more than I can care to say, by finding how 
much that is abominable may be discovered by an ill- 
tanght curiosity, in tlie purest things that earth is allowed 
to produce for us; — perhaps if we were less reprobate in 
our own ways, the grass which is our type might con- 
duct itself better, even though it has no hope but of 
being cast into the oven ; in the meantime, healthy 
human eyes and thoughts are to be set on the lovely 
laws of its growth and habitation, and not on the mean 
mysteries of its birth. 

9. I relieve, therefore, our presently inquiring souls 
from any farther care as to the reason for a \ iolet's spur, 
— or for the extremely ugly arrangements of its stamens 
and style, invisible unless by vexatious and vicious peep- 
ing. You are to think of a violet only in its green 
leaves, and purple or golden petals ; — you are to know 
the varieties of form in both, proper to common species ; 
and in what kind of places they all most fondly live, and 
most deeply glow. 

" And the recreation of the minde which is taken 
heereby cannot be but verie good and honest, fur they 
admonish and stir up a man to that which is comely and 
honest. For flowers, through their beautie, varietie of 
colour, and exquisite forme, do bring to a liberall and 
gentle manly minde the remembrance of honestie, come- 
liness, and all kinds of vertues. For it would be an un- 
geemely and filthie thing, as a certain wise man saith, for 



I. VIOLA. 7 

hini that dotli looke upon and liandle faire and beautiful 
things, and who frequenteth and is conversant in faire 
and beautiful places, to have his mind not faire, but 
filthie and deformed." 

10. Thus Gerarde, in the close of his introductory 
notice of tlio violet, — speaking of things, (lionesty, come- 
liness, and the like,) scarcely now recognized as desirable 
in the realm of England ; but having previously ob- 
served that violets are useful for the making of garlands 
for the head, and posies to smell to ; — in which last func- 
tion I observe they are still pleasing to the British pub- 
lic: and I found the children here, only the other day, 
munching a confection of candied violet leaves. What 
pleasure the flower can still give us, uncandied, and un- 
bound, but in its own place and life, I will try to trace 
through some of its constant laws. 

11. And first, let us be clear that the native colour of 
the violet is violet ; and that the white and yellow kinds, 
though pretty in their place and way, are not to be 
thouglit of in generally meditating the flower's quality 
or power. A white violet is to black ones what a black 
man is to white ones; and the yellow varieties are, I 
believe, properly pansies, and belong also to wild dis- 
tricts for the most part; but the true violet, which I 
have just now called ' black,' with Gerarde, " the blacke 
or purple violet, hath a great prerogative above others," 
and all the nobler species of the pansy itself are of full 
purple, inclining, however, in the ordinary wild violet to 



8 PKOSEItPINA. 

blue. In the 'Laws of Fesole,' chap, vii,, §§ 20, 21, I 
have made this dark pansy the representative of purple 
pure ; the viola odorata, of the link between that full 
purple and blue ; and the heath -blossom of the link be- 
tween that full purple and red. The reader will do well, 
as much as may be possible to him, to associate his study 
of botany, as indeed all other studies of visible things, 
with that of painting : but he must remember that he 
cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch 
the flower in its early growth. It becomes dim in age, 
and dark when it is gathered — at least, when it is tied in 
bunches ; — but I am under the impression that the colour 
actually deadens also, — at all events, no other single 
flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground 
near it as a violet will. The bright hounds-tongue looks 
merely like a spot of bright paint ; but a young Anolet 
glows like painted glass. 

12. Which, when you have once well noticed, the two 
lines of Milton and Shakspearo which seem opposed, 
will both become clear to you. The said linos are 
dragged from hand to hand along their pages of pilfered 
quotations by the hack botanists, — who probably 2iever 
saw them, nor anything else, in Shakspeare or Milton in 
their lives, — till even in reading them where they rightly 
come, you can scarcely recover their fresh meaning : but 
none of the botanists ever think of asking why Perdita 
calls the violet ' dim,' and Milton ' glowing.' 

Perdita, indeed, calls it dim, at that moment, in think- 



I. VIOLA. 9 

ing of her own love, and tlie bidden passion of it, un- 
speakable ; nor is Milton without some purpose of using 
it as an emblem of love, mourning, — but, in both cases, 
the subdued and quiet hue of the flower as an actual tint 
of colour, and the strange force and life of it as a part 
of light, are felt to their uttermost. 

And observe, also, that both of the poets contrast the 
violet, in its softness, with the intense marking of the 
pansy. Milton makes the opposition directly — 

" Ihe pansy, freaked with jet, 
The glowing violet." 

Shakspeare shows yet stronger sense of the difference, in 
the "purple with Love's wound" of the pansy, while 
the violet is sweet with Love's hidden life, and sweeter 
than the lids of Juno's eyes. 

Whereupon, we may perhaps consider with ourselves 
a little, what the difference is between a violet and a 
pansy ? 

13. Is, I say, and was, and is to come, — in spite of 
florists, who try to make pansies round, instead of pen- 
tagonal ; and of the wise classifying people, who say that 
violets and pansies are the same thing — and that neither 
of them are of much interest ! As, for instance. Dr. 
Lindley in his ' Ladies' Botany.' 

" Violets — sweet Violets, and Pansies, or Heartsease, 
represent a small family, with the structure of which 
you should be famihar ; more, however, for the sake of 



10 ' PEOSEKPINA. 

its singularitj than for its extent or importance, for the 
family is a verj small one, and there are but few species 
belonging to it in which much interest is taken. As 
the parts of the Heartsease are larger than those of the 
Yiolet, let us select the former in preference for the 
subject of our study." Whereupon we plunge instantly 
into the usual account of things with horns and tails. 
" The stamens are five in number — two of them, which 
are in front of the others, are hidden within the horn of 
the front petal," etc., etc., etc. (Note in passing, by the 
' horn of the front ' petal he means the ' spur of the hot- 
torn'' one, which indeed does stand in front of the rest, 
— but if therefore it is to be called the front petal — 
which is the back one ?) You may find in the next par- 
agraph description of a " singular conformation," and 
the interesting conclusion that " no one has yet discov- 
ered for what purpose this singular conformation was 
provided." But you will not, in the entire article, find 
the least attempt to tell you the difference between a 
violet and a pansy ! — except in one statement — and that 
false ! " The sweet violet will have no rival among 
flowers, if we merely seek for delicate fragrance ; but 
her sister, the heartsease, who is destitute of all sweet- 
ness, far surpasses her in rich dresses and gaudy ! ! ! 
colours." The heartsease is not without sweetness. 
There are sweet pansies scented, and dog pansies un- 
scented — as there are sweet violets scented, and dog 
violets unscented. What is the real dijfference % 



I. VIOLA. 11 

li. I turn to another scientific gentleman — more sci- 
entific in form indeed, Mr. Grindon, — and find, for an- 
other interesting phenomenon in the violet, that it some- 
times produces flowers without any petals! and in the 
pansy, that " the flowers turn towards the sun, and when 
many are open at once, present a droll appearance, look- 
ing like a number of faces all on the ' qui vive.' " But 
nothing of the difference between them, except some- 
thing about 'stipules,' of which "it is important to ob- 
serve that the leaves should be taken from the middle of 
the stem — those above and below being variable." 

I observe, however, that Mr. Grindon has arranged 
his violets under the letter A, and his pansies under the 
letter B, and that something may be really made out of 
him, witli an hour or two's work. I am content, how- 
ever, at present, with his simplifying assurance that of 
violet and pansy together, " six species grow wild in 
Britain — or, as some believe, only four — while the ana- 
lysts run the number up to fifteen." 

15. Next I try Loudon's Cyclopaedia, which, through 
all its 700 pages, is equally silent on the l)usiness ; and 
next, Mr. Baxter's ' British Flowering Plants,' in the 
index of which I find neither Pansy nor Heartsease, and 
only the ' Calathian ' Yiolet, (where on earth is Cala- 
thia ?) which proves, on turning it up, to be a Gentian. 

16. At last, I take my Figuier, (but what should I do 
if I only knew English ?) and find this much of clue to 
the matter : — 



12 PROSERPINA. 

" Qn'est ce que c'est que la Pensee ? Cette jolie plante 
appartient aussi ou genre Viola, mais a un section de ce 
genre. En effet, dans les Pensees, les petales superieurs 
et lateranx sont diriges en haut, I'inferieur seul est 
dirige en bas : et de plus, le stigmate est urceole, glo- 
buleux." 

And farther, this general description of the whole 
violet tribe, which I translate, that we may have its full 
value : — 

" The violet is a plant without a stem (tige), — (see 
vol. i., p. 154,) — whose height does not surpass one or 
two decimetres. Its leaves, radical, or carried on stolons, 
(vol. i., p. 158,) are sharp, or oval, crenulate, or heart- 
shape. Its stipules are oval-acuminate, or lanceolate. 
Its flowers, of sweet scent, of a dark violet or a reddish 
blue, are carried each on a slender peduncle, which bends 
down at the summit. Such is, for the botanist, the 
Violet, of which the jjoets would give assuredly another 
description." 

17. Perhaps ; or even the painters ! or even an ordi- 
nary unbotanical human creature ! I must set about my 
business, at any rate, in my own way, now, as I best can, 
looking first at things themselves, and then putting this 
and that together, out of these botanical persons, which 
they can't put together out of themselves. And first, I 
go down into my kitchen garden, where the path to the 
lake has a border of pansies on both sides all the way 
down, with clusters of narcissus behind them. And 



T. YIOLA. 13 

pulling up a handful of pansies by the roots, I find them 
"without stems," indeed, if a stem means a wooden 
thing ; but I should saj, for a low-growing flower, quiet 
lankily and disagreeably stalky ! And, thinking over 
what I remember about wild pansies, I find an impres- 
sion on my mind of their being rather more stalky, al- 
ways, than is quite graceful ; and, for all their fine flow- 
ers, having rather a weedy and littery look, and getting 
into places where they have no business. See, again, 
vol. i., chap, vi., § 5. 

18. And now, going up into my flower and fruit gar- 
den, I find (June 2nd, 1881, half-past six, morning,) 
among the wild saxifrages, which are allowed to grow 
wherever they like, and the rock strawberries, and Fran- 
eescas, which are coaxed to grow wherever there is a bit 
of rough ground for them, a bunch or two of pale pan- 
sies, or violets, I don't know well which, by the flower ; 
but the entire company of them has a ragged, jagged, 
unpurpose-like look ; extremely, — I should say, — demor- 
alizing to all the little plants in their neighbourhood : and 
on gatliering a flower, I find it is a nasty big thing, all 
of a feeble blue, and with two things like horns, or 
thorns, sticking out where its ears would be, if the 
pansy's frequently monkey face were underneath them. 
Which I find to be two of the leaves of its calyx 'out of 
place,' and, at all events, for their part, therefore, weedy, 
and insolent. 

19. I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower is 



14 PROSERPINA. 

lifted on a lanky, awkward, springless, and yet stiff 
flower-stalk ; which is not round, as a flower-stalk ought 
to be, (vol. i., p. 155,) but obstinately square, and fluted, 
with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an 
iron-foundry for a cheap railway station. I perceive 
also that it has set on it, just before turning down to 
carry the flower, two little jaggy and indefinable leaves, 
— their colour a little more violet than the blossom. 

These, and such undeveloping leaves, wherever they 
occur, are called ' bracts ' by botanists, a good word, from 
the Latin ' bractea,' meaning a piece of metal plate, so 
thin as to crackle. They seem always a little stifi^, like 
bad parchment, — ^born to come to nothing — a sort of in- 
finitesimal fairy-lawyer's deed. They ought to have been 
in my index at p. 255, under the head of leaves, and are 
frequent in flower structure, — never, as far as one can 
see, of the smallest use. They are constant, however, in 
the flower-stalk of the whole violet tribe. 

20. I perceive, farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, 
bending a little in a crabbed, broken way, like an obsti- 
nate pei-son tired, pushes itself up out of a still more 
stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas- 
pipe of a stalk, with a section something like this, 

^^^^ but no bigger than \f with a quantity of 

ill-made and ill-hemmed leaves on it, of no describable 
leaf-cloth or texture, — not cressic, (though the thing does 



I. VIOLA. 15 

altogether look a good deal like a quite uneatable old 
watercress); notsalviau, for there's no look of warmth 
or comfort in them ; not cauline, for there's no juice in 
them ; not dryad, for there's no strength in them, nor 
apparent use : they seem only there, as far as I can make 
out, to spoil the flower, and take the good out of my 
garden bed. Nobody in the world could draw them, 
they are so mixed up together, and crumpled and hacked 
about, as if some ill-natured child had snipped them with 
blunt scissors, and an ill-natured cow chewed them a 
little afterwards and left them, proved for too tough or 
too bitter. 

21. Having now sufiiciently observed, it seenis to me, 
this incongruous plant, I proceed to ask myself, over it, 
M. Figuier's question, ' Qu'est-ce c'est qu'un Pensee?' 
Is this a violet — or a pansy — or a bad imitation of both ? 

Whereupon I try if it has any scent : and to my much 
surprise, find it has a full and soft one — which I suppose 
is what my gardener keeps it for! According to Dr. 
Lindley, then, it must be a violet ! But according to M. 
Figuier, — let me see, do its middle petals bend up, or 
down? 

I think I'll go and ask the gardener what Jie calls it. 

22. My gardener, on appeal to him, tells me it is the 
' Yiola Cornuta,' but that he does not know himself if it 
is violet or pansy. I take my Loudon again, and find 
there were fifty-three species of violets, known in his 
days, of which, as it chances, Cornuta is exactly the last. 



16 PROSEIJPINA. 

' Homed violet ' : I said the green things were like 
horns! — but what is one to say of, or to do to, scientific 
people, who first call the spur of the violet's petal, horn, 
and then its calyx points, horns, and never define a 
' horn ' all the while ! 

Yiola Cornuta, however, let it be ; for the name does 
mean something, and is not false Latin. But whether 
violet or pansy, I must look farther to find out. 

23. I take the Flora Danica, in which I at least am 
sure of finding whatever is done at all, done as well as 
honesty and care can ; and look what species of violets it 
gives. 

limine, in the first ten volumes of it; four in their 
modern sequel (that I know of, — I have had no time to 
examine the last issues). Namely, in alphabetical order, 
with their present Latin, or tentative Latin, names; and 
in plain English, the senses intended by the hapless scien- 
tific people, in such their tentative Latin : — 

(1) Viola Arvensis. Field (Yiolet) ... No. 1748 

(2) " Biflora. Two-flowered ... 46 

(3) « Canina. Dog 1453 

(3b) " Canina. Var. Multicaulis (many- 

stemmed), a very singular sort of 

violet — ^if it were so ! Its real dif- 
ference from our dog-violet is in 
being pale blue, and having a 
golden centre 2646 



I. VIOLA, 17 

(4) Viola Hirta. Hairy 618 

(5) '' Mirabilis. Marvellous .... 1045 

(6) " Montana. Mountain 1329 

(7) " Odorata. Odorous ..... 309 

(8) " Palustris. Marshy 83 

(9) " Tncolor. Three-coloured ... 623 
(9b) " Tricolor. Yar. Arenaria, Sandy 

Three-coloured 2647 

(10) " Elatior. Taller 68 

(11) " Epipsila. (Heaven knows what : it is 

Greek, not Latin, and looks as if 
it meant something between a 
bishop and a short letter e) . . 2405 

I next run down this list, noting what names we can 
keep, and what we can't ; and what aren't worth keep- 
ing, if we could: passing over the varieties, however, 
for the present, wholly. 

(1) Arvensis. Field-violet. Good. 

(2) Biflora. A good epithet, but in false Latin. It is 

to be our Viola aurea, golden pansy. 

(3) Canina. L)og. Not pretty, but intelligible, and 

by common use now classical. Must stay. 

(4) Hirta. Late Latin slang for hirsuta, and always 

used of nasty places or nasty people ; it shall not 

stay. The species shall be our Viola Seclusa, — 

Monk's violet — meaning the kind of monk who 

leads a rough life like Elijah's, or the Baptist's, 
8 



18 PROSERPINA. 

or Esau's — in another kind. This violet is one of 
the loveliest that grows. 

(5) Mirabilis. Stays so ; marvellous enough, truly : not 

more so than all violets ; but I am very glad to 
hear of scientific people capable of admiring any- 
thing. 

(6) Montana. Stays so. 

(Y) Odorata. Not distinctive; — nearly classical, how- 
ever. It is to be oui- Viola Regina, else I should 
not have altered it. 

(8) Palustris. Stays so. 

(9) Tricolor. True, but intolerable. The flower is the 

queen of the true pansies : to be our Viola Psyche. 

(10) Elatior. Only a variety of our already accepted 

Cornuta. 

(11) The last is, I believe, also only a variety of Palus- 

tris. Its leaves, I am informed in the text, are 
either " pubescent-reticulate-venose-subrenif orm," 
or " lato-cordate-repando-crenate ;" and its stipules 
are " ovate-acuminate-fim brio-denticulate," I do 
not wish to pursue the inquiry farther. 

24. These ten species will include, noting here and 
there a local variety, all the forms which are familiar to 
us in Northern Europe, except only two ; — these, as it 
singularly chances, being the Viola Alpium, noblest of 
all the wild pansies in the world, so far as I have seen or 
heard of them, — of which, consequently, I find no pic- 



I. VIOLA. 19 

ture, nor notice, in any botanical work whatsoever ; and 
the other, the rock- violet of our own Yorkshire hills. 

We have therefore, ourselves, finally then, twelve fol- 
lowing species to study. I give thera now all in their 
accepted names and proper order, — the reasons for occa- 
sional difference between the Latin and English name 
will be presently given. 

(1) Viola Kegina. Queen violet. 

(2) " Psyche. Ophelia's pansy. 

(3) " Alpium. Freneli's pansy. 
(i) " Aurea. Golden violet. 

(5) " Montana. Mountain Violet. 

(6) " Mirabihs. Marvellous violet. 
(Y) " Arvensis. Field violet. 

(8) " Palustris. Marsh violet. 

(9) " Seclusa. Monk's violet. 

(10) " Canina. Dog violet. 

(11) " Cornuta. Cow violet. 

(12) " Kupestris. Crag violet. 

25. We will try, presently, what is to be found out of 
useful, or pretty, concerning all these twelve violets; 
but must first find out how we are to know which are 
violets indeed, and which, pansies. 

Yesterday, after finishing my list, I went out again to 
examine Viola Cornuta a little closer, and pulled up a 
full grip of it by the roots, and put it in water in a wash- 
hand basin, which it filled like a truss of green hay. 



^0 



PROSERPUSTA. 



Pulling out two or three separate plants, I find each 
to consist mainly of a jointed stalk of a kind I have not 
yet described, — roughly, some two feet long altogether ; 
(accurately, one 1 ft. 10|^ in. ; another, 1 ft. 10 in. ; an- 
other, 1 ft. 9 in. — but all these measures taken without 
straightening, and therefore about an inch short of the 
truth), and divided into seven or eight lengths by clumsy 
joints where the mangled leafage is knotted on it ; but 
broken a little out of the way at each joint, like a rheu- 
matic elbow that won't come straight, or bend farther • 
and — which is the most curious point of all in it — it is 
thickest in the middle, like a viper, and gets quite thin 
to the root and thin towards the flower ; also the lengths 
between the joints are longest in the middle : here I 
give them in inches, from the root upwards, in a stalk 
taken at random. 



1st (nearest root) . , . Of 


Snd 




Of 


3rd 








li 


4th 








if 


5th 








3 


6th 








4 


7th 








3i 


8th 








3 


9th 






Si 


10th 






u 










1 ft. 9f in. 



But the thickness of the joints and length of terminal 
flower stalk bring the total to two feet and about an inch 



I. VIOLA. SI 

over. I dare not pull it straight, or should break it, hut 
it overlaps my two-foot rule considerably, and there are 
two inches besides of root, which are merely under- 
ground stem, very thin and wretched, as the rest of it is 
merely root above ground, very thick and bloated. , (I 
begin actually to be a little awed at it, as I should be by 
a green snake — only the snake woiild be prettier.) The 
flowers also, I perceive, have not their two horns regu- 
larly set in, but the five spiky calyx-ends stick out be- 
tween the petals — sometimes three, sometimes four, it 
may be all live up and down — and produce variously 
fanged or forked effects, feebly ophidian or diabolic. 
On the whole, a plant entirely mismanaging itself, — 
reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than 
awkwardness ; and clearly, no true ' species,' but only a 
link.* And it really is, as you will find presently, a 
link in two directions ; it is half violet, half pansy, a 
'cur' among the Dogs, and a thoughtless thing among 
the thoughtful. And being so, it is also a link between 
the entire violet tribe and the Runners — pease, straw- 
berries, and the like, whose glory is in their speed ; but 
a violet has no business whatever to run anywhere, 
being appointed to stay where it was born, in extremely 
Gontentcd (if not secluded) places. ■" Half-hidden from 
the eye?" — no; but desiring attention, or extension, or 
corpulence, or connection with anybody else's family, 
still less. 

* See ' Deucalion,' vol. ii., chap, i., p. 12, § 18. 



23 



PROSERPINA. 




2G. And if, at the time you read this, jou can run out 
and gather a true violet, and its leaf, you will find that 
the flower grows from the very ground, out of a cl ister 
of heart-shaped leaves, becoming here a little roundar, 
there a little sharper, but on the whole heart-shaped, and 
that is the proper and essential form of the violet leaf. 
You will find also tliat the flower has five petals ; and 
being held down by the bent stalk, two of them bend 
back and up, as if resisting it ; two expand at the sides : 
and one, the principal, grows downwards, 
with its attached spur behind. So that the 
front view of the flower must be some modifi- 
cation of this typical arrangement. Fig. m, 
(for middle form). Now the statement above 
quoted from Figuier, § 16, means, if he had 
been able to express himself, that the two lat- 
eral petals in the violet are directed down- 
wards. Fig. II. A, and in the pansy upwards, 
Fig. II. c. And that, in the main, is true, 
and to be fixed well and clearly in your mind. 
But in the real 02-ders, one flower passes into 
the other through all kinds of intermediate 
positions of petal, and the plurality of species 
are of the middle type, Fig. II. b.* 

27. Next, if you will gather a real pansy leaf^ you 
w411 And it — not heart-shape in the least, but sharp oval 

* I am ashamed to give so rude outlines; but every moment now 
is valuabl e to me: careful outline of a dof?-violet is i^iven in Plate X. 




Fig. II. 



I. VIOLA. 23 

or spear-shape, with two deep cloven lateral flakes at its 
s]iringing from tlie stalk, which, in ordinary aspect, give 
the plant the haggled and draggled look I have been 
vilifying it for. These, and such as these, "leaflets at 
the base of other leaves" (Balfour's Glossary), are called 
by botanists ' stipules.' I have not allowed the word 
yet, and am doubtful of allowing it, because it entirely 
confuses the student's sense of the Latin 'stipula' (see 
above, vol. i., chap, viii., § 27) doubly and trebly im- 
portant in its connection with 'stipulor,' not noticed in 
that jiaragraph, but readable in your large Johnson ; we 
shall liave more to say of it when we come to ' straw ' 
itself. 

28. In the meantime, one may think of these things 
as stipulations for leaves, not fulfllled, or 'stumps' or 
'suraphs'of leaves! But I think lean do better for 
them. We have already got the idea of crested leaves, 
(see vol. i., plate); now, on each side of a knight's crest, 
from earliest Etruscan times down to those of tlie Scalas, 
the fashion of armour held, among the nations who 
wished to make themselves terrible in aspect, of putting 
cut plates or ' bracts ' of metal, like dragons' wings, on 
each side of the crest. I believe the custom never be- 
came Norman or English ; it is essentially Greek, Etrus- 
ean, or Italian, — the Norman and Dane always wearing 
a practical cone (see the coins of Canute), and the Frank 
or English knights the severely plain beavered helmet ; 
the Black Prince's at Canterbury, and Henry V.'s at 



24 PROSERPINA. 

Westminster, are kept hitherto bj the great fates for us 
to see. But the Southern knights coustantly wore these 
lateral dragon's wings; and if I can find their special 
name, it may perhaps be substituted with advantage for 
'stipule'; but I have not wit enough by me just now to 
invent a term. 

29. Whatever we call them, the things themselves are, 
throughout all the species of violets, developed in the 
running and weedy varieties, and much subdued in the 
beautiful ones; and generally the pansies have them 
large, with spear-sliaped central leaves ; and the violets 
small, with heart-shaped leaves, for more effective deco- 
ration of the gi'ouud. I now note tlie characters of each 
species in their above given order. 

30. I. YioLA Regina. Queen Violet. Sweet Yiolet. 
'Yiola Odorata,' L., Flora Danica, and Sowerby. The 
latter draws it with golden centre and white base of 
lower petal ; the Flora Danica, all purple. It is some- 
times altogether white. It is seen most perfectly for 
setting oif its colour, in group with primrose, — and most 
luxuriantly, so far as 1 know, in hollows of the Savoy 
limestones, associated with the pervenche, which em- 
broiders and illumines them all over. I believe it is the 
earliest of its race, sometimes called ' Martia,' March 
violet. In Greece and South Italy even a flower of the 
winter. 

" The Spring is come, the violet's gone, 
The first-born child of the early sun. 



X. VIOLA. 25 

With us, she is but a winter's flower; 
The snow on the hills cannot blast her bower. 
And she lifts up her dewy eye of blue 
To the youngest sky of the selfsame hue. 

And when the Spring comes, with her host 
Of flowers, that flower beloved the most 
Shrinks from the crowd that may confuse 
Her heavenly odoui-, and \drgin hues. 

Pluck the others, but still remember 
Their herald out of dim December, — 
TJie morning star of all the flowers. 
The pledge of daylight's lengthened hours. 
Nor, midst the roses, e'er forget 
The virgin, virgin violet." * 

3. It is the queen, not only of the violet tribe, but of 
all low-growing flowers, in sweetness of scent — variously 
applicable and serviceable in domestic economy : — the 
scent of the lily of the valley seems less capable of pres- 
ervation or use. 

But, respecting these perpetual beneficences and be- 
nignities of the sacred, as opposed to the malignant, 
herbs, whose poisonous power is for the most part re- 

* A careless bit of Byron's, (the last song but one in the ' Deformed 
TraGsformed '); but Byron's most careless work is better, by its in- 
nate energj', than other people's most laboured. I suppress, in some 
doubts about my ' digamma,' notes on the Greek violet and the Ion 
of Euripides; — which the reader will perhaps be good enough to 
fancy a serious loss to him, and supply for himself. 



26 PEOSERPIKA. 

strained ip them, during their life, to their jnices or dust, 
and not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like 
the scholar to re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to 
consider with himself what a grotesquely warped and 
gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which fierce- 
ly busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every 
leaf from the forests ten miles round ; and yet cannot 
tell us, nor even think of telling us, nor does even one 
of its pupils think of asking it all the while, how a violet 
throws off her perfume ! — far less, whether it might not 
be more wholesome to ' treat ' the air which men are to 
breathe in masses, by administration of vale-lilies and 
violets, instead of charcoal and sulphur ! 

The closing sentence of the first volume just now re- 
ferred to — p. 254 — should also be re-read ; it was the 
sum of a chapter I had in hand at that time on the Sub- 
stances and Essences of Plants — which never got fin- 
ished; — and in trying to put it into small space, it 
has become obscure : the tenns " logically inexplicable" 
meaning that no words or process of comparison will de- 
fine scents, nor do any traceable modes of sequence or 
relation connect them ; each is an independent power, 
and gives a se])arate impression to the senses. Above 
all, there is no logic of pleasure, nor any assignable 
reason for the difference, between loathsome and de- 
lightful scent, which makes the fungus foul and the 
vervain sacred : but one practical conclusion I (who am 
in all final ways the most prosaic and practical of human 



I. VIOLA. 27 

creatures) do very solemnly beg mj readers to meditate ; 
namely, that although not recognized by actual offensive- 
ness of scent, there is no space of neglected land which 
is not in some way modifying the atmosphere of all the 
world, — it may be, beneficently, as heath and pine, — it 
may be, malignantly, as Pontine marsh or Brazilian 
jungle; but, in one way or another, for good and evil 
constantly, by day and night, the various powers of life 
and death in the plants of the desert are poured into the 
air, as vials of continual angels : and that no words, no 
thoughts can measure, nor imagination follow, the possi- 
ble change for good which energetic and tender care of 
the wild herbs of the field and trees of the wood might 
bring, in time, to the bodily pleasure and mental power 
of Man. 

32. II. Viola Psyche. Ophelia's Pansy. 

The wild heart's-ease of Europe ; its proper colour an 
exquisitely clear purple in the upper petals, gradated 
into deep blue in the lower ones ; the centre, gold. Not 
larger than a violet, but perfectly formed, and firmly set 
in all its petals. Able to live in the driest ground ; 
beautiful in the coast sand-hills of Cumberland, follow- 
ing the wild geranium and burnet rose : and distin- 
guished thus by its power of life, in waste and dry 
places, from the violet, which needs kindly earth and 
shelter. 

Quite one of the most lovely things that Heaven has 
made, and only degraded and distorted by any human 



28 PKOSERPINA. 

interference ; the swollen varieties of it produced by 
cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse in colour 
by comparison. 

It is badly drawn even in the ' Flora Danica,' No. 623, 
considered there apparently as a species escaped from 
gardens ; the description of it being as follows : — 

"Yiola tricolor hortensis repens, flore purpureo et 
cceruleo, C. B. P., 199." (I don't know what C. B. P. 
means.) " Passim, juxta villas." 

" Yiola tricolor, caule triquetro diifiiso, foliis oblongis 
incisis, stipulis pinnatiiidis," Linn. Systema Katurae, 185. 

33. " l^ear the country farms " — does the Danish 
botanist mean? — the more luxuriant weedy character 
probably acquired by it only in such neighbourbood ; 
and, I suppose, various confusion and degeneration pos- 
sible to it beyond other plants when once it leaves its 
wild home. It is given by Sibthorpe from the Trojan 
Olympus, with an exquisitely delicate leaf ; the flower de- 
scribed as " triste et pallide violaceus," but coloured in 
his plate full purple ; and as he does not say whether he 
went up Olympus to gather it himself, or only saw it 
brought down by the assistant whose lovely drawings 
are yet at Oxford, I take leave to doubt his epithets. 
That this should be the only Yiolet described in a ' Flora 
Grseca' extending to ten folio volumes, is a fact in 
modern scientific history which I must leave the Pro- 
fessor of Botany and the Dean of Christ Church to 
explain. 



I. VIOLA. 29 

34. The English varieties seem often to be yellow in 
the lower petals, (see Sowerby's plate, 1287 of the old 
edition) , crossed, I imagine, with Viola Aurea, (but see 
under Viola Rupestris, No. 12) ; the names, also, vary- 
ing between tricolor and bicolor — with no note any- 
where of the three colours, or two colours, intended ! 

The old English names are many. — ' Love in idleness,' 
— making Lysander, as Titania, much wandering in mind, 
and for a time mere ' Kits run the street ' (or run the 
wood ?) — " Call me to you" (Gerarde, ch. 299, Sowerby, 
No. 178), with ' Herb Trinity,' from its three colours, 
blue, purple, and gold, variously blended in different 
countries? 'Three faces mider a hood' describes the 
English variety only. Said to be the ancestress of all 
the florists' pansies, but this I much doubt, the next 
following species being far nearer the forms most chiefly 
sought for. 

35. III. Viola Alpina. ' Freneli's Pansy ' — my own 
name for it, from Gotthelf's Freneli, in 'Ulric the 
Farmer'; the entirely pure and noble type of the Ber- 
nese maid, wife, and mother. 

The pansy of the Wengern Alp in specialty, and of 
the higher, but still rich, Alpine pastures. Full dark- 
purple ; at least an inch across the expanded petals ; I 
beKeve, the 'Mater Violarum' of Gerarde; and true 
black violet of Virgil, remaining in Italian ' Viola Mam- 
niola ' (Gerarde, ch. 298). 

36. IV. Viola Actkea. Golden Violet. Biflora usu- 



30 PROSEEPINA. 

ally ; but its brilliant yellow is a mucli more definite 
characteristic ; and needs insisting on, because there is a 
* Viola lutea' which is not yellow at all; named so by 
the garden florists. My Viola aurea is tbe Rock-violet 
of the Alps ; one of the bravest, brightest, and dearest 
of little flowers. The following notes upon it, with its 
summer companions, a little corrected from my diary of 
1877, will enough characterize it. 

" June "ith. — The cultivated meadows now grow only 
dandehons — in frightful quantity too ; but, for wild 
ones, primula, bell gentian, golden pansy, and anemone, — 
Primula farinosa in mass, the pansy pointing and vivify- 
ing in a petulant sweet way, and the bell gentian here 
and there deepening all, — as if indeed the sound of a 
deep bell among lighter music. 

" Counted in order, I find the effectively constant 
flowers are eight ;* namely, 

" 1. The golden anemone, with richly cut large leaf ; 
primrose colour, and in masses like primrose, studded 
through them with bell gentian, and dark purple orchis. 

" 2. The dark purple orchis, with bell gentian in equal 
quantity, say six of each in square yard, broken by 
sparklings of the white orchis and the white grass-flower ;• 
the richest piece of colour I ever saw, touched with gold 
by the geum. 



* Nine ; I see that I missed count of P. farinosa, the most abund- 
ant of all. 



I. VIOLA. 31 

" 3 and 4. These will be white orchis and the grass 
flower.* 

" 5. Geum — everywhere, in deep, but pure, gold, like 
pieces of Greek mosaic. 

" 6. Soldauella, in the lower meadows, delicate, but 
not here in masses. 

" 7. Primula Alpina, divine in the rock clefts, and on 
the ledges changing the grey to purple, — set in the drip- 
ping caves with 

" 8. Viola (pertinax — pert) ; I want a Latin word for 
various studies — failures all-^to express its saucy little 
stuck-up way, and exquisitely trim peltate leaf. I never 
saw such a lovely perspective line as the pure front leaf 
profile. Impossible also to get the least of the spirit of 
its lovely dark brown fibre markings. Intensely golden 
these dark fibres, just browning the petal a little between, 
them." 

And again in the defile of Gondo, I find " Yiola (sax- 
atilis ?) name yet wanted ; — in the most delicate studding 
of its round leaves, like a small feni more than violet, 
and bright sparkle of small flowers in the dark dripping 
hollows. Assuredly delights in shade and distilling 
moisture of rocks." 

* " A feeble little quatrefoil — growing one on the stem, like a Par- 
nassia, and looking like a Parnassia that had dropped a leaf. I think it 
drops one of its own four, mostly, and lives as three-fourths of itself, 
for most of its time. Stamens pale gold. Root-leaves, three or four, 
grass-like ; growing among the moist moss chiefly." 



32 PROSERPIlSrA. 

I found afterwards a much larger yellow pansy on the 
Yorkshire high limestones ; with vigorously black crow- 
foot marking on the lateral petals. 

37. Y. YioLA Montana. Mountain Yiolet. 

Flora Danica, 1329. Linnseus, No. 13, " Caulibus 
erectis, foliis cordato-lanceolatis, floribus serioribus apeta- 
lis," i.e., on erect stems, with leaves long heart-shape, 
and its later flowers without jjetals — not a word said of 
its earlier flowers which have got those unimportant ap- 
pendages ! In the plate of the Flora it is a very perfect 
transitional form between violet and pansy, with beauti- 
fully firm and well-curved leaves, but the colour of blos- 
som very pale. " In subalpinis JSTorvegise passim," all 
that we are told of it, means I suppose, in the lower 
Alpine pastures of Norway ; in the Flora Suecica, p. 
306, habitat in Lapponica, juxta Alpes. 

38. YI. YiOLA MiEABiLis. Flora Danica, 1045. A 
email and exquisitely formed flower in the balanced 
cinquefoil intermediate between violet and pansy, but 
with large and superbly curved and pointed leaves. It 
is a mountain violet, but belonging rather to the moun- 
tain woods than meadows. "In sylvaticis in Toten, 
ISTorvegise." 

Loudon, 3056, " Broad-leaved : Germany." 
Linnseus, Flora Suecica, 789, says that the flowers of 
it which have perfect corolla and full scent often bear 
no seed, but that the later 'cauline' blossoms, without 
petals, are fertile. " Caulini vero apetali fertiles sunt, 
et seriores. Habitat passim Upsaliae." 



I. VIOLA. 33 

I find this, and a plurality of other species, indicated 
bj Linnaeus as having triangular stalks, " caule triquetro," 
meaning, I suppose, the kind sketched in Figure 1 above. 

39. YII. YioLA Aevensis, Field Yiolet. Flora Dau- 
ica, 1748. A coarse running weed; nearly like Yiola 
Cornuta, but feebly lilac and yellow in colour. In dry 
fields, and with corn. 

Flora Suecica, 701; under titles of Yiola 'tricolor' 
and ' bicolor arvensis,' and Herba Trinitatis. Ilabitat 
ubique in sterilihus arvis : " Planta vix datur in qua 
evidentius perspicitur generationis opus, quam in hujus 
cavo apertoque stigmate." 

It is quite undeterminable, among present botanical 
instructors, how far this plant is only a rampant and 
ovei'-indulged condition of the true pansy (Yiola Psyche) ; 
but my own scholars are to remember that the true 
pansy is full purple and blue with golden centre ; and 
that the disorderly field varieties of it, if indeed not 
scientifically distinguishable, are entirely separate trom 
the wild flower by their scattered form and faded or 
altered colour. I follow the Flora Danica in giving 
them as a distinct species. 

40. YIII. Yiola Palusteis. Marsh Yiolet. Flora 
Danica, 83. As there drawn, the most finished and deli- 
cate in form of all the violet tribe ; warm white, streaked 
with red ; and as pure in outline as an oxalis, both in 
flower and leaf : it is like a violet imitating oxalis and 
anagallis. 

3 



34 PKOSEKPINA. 

In the Mora Suecica, the petal-markings are said to bo 
black; in ' Yiola lactea' a connected species, (Sowerby, 
45,) purple. Sowerby 's plate of it under the name 
' palustris ' is pale purple veined with darker ; and the 
spur is said to be ' honej-bearing,' which is the first men- 
tion I find of honey in the violet. The habitat given, 
sandy and turfy heaths. It is said to grow plentifully 
near Croydon. 

Probably, therefore, a violet belonging to the chalk, 
on which nearly all herbs that grow wild — from the 
grass to the bluebell — are singularly sweet and pure. I 
hope some of my botanical scholars will take up this 
question of the effect of different rocks on vegetation, 
not so much in bearing different species of plants, as 
different characters of each species.* 

41. IX. Viola Seclusa. Monk's Violet. "Hirta,'' 
Flora Danica, 618, "■ In fruticetis raro." A true wood 
violet, full but dim in purple. Sowerby, 894, makes it 
paler. The leaves very pure and severe in the Danish 
one ; — longer in the EngUsh. " Clothed on both sides 
with short, dense, hoary hairs." 

Also belongs to chalk or limestone only (Sowerby). 

X. Viola Canina. Dog Violet. I have taken it for 
analysis in my two plates, because its grace of form is 
too much despised, and we owe much more of the beauty 

* The great work of Lecoq, ' Geographic Botanique,' is of priceless 
value ; but treats all on too vast a scale for oiu- purposes. 



I. VIOLA. 35 

of spring to it, in English mountain ground, than to the 
Regina. 

XI. YicLA CoENTJTA. Cow Yiolet. Enough described 
already. 

XII. YioLA RuPESTEis. Crag Yiolet. On the high 
limestone moors of Yorkshire, perhaps only an English 
form of Yiola Aurea, but so much larger, and so differ- 
ent in habit — growing on dry breezy downs, instead of 
in dripping caves — that I allow it, for the present, sep- 
arate name and number.* 

42. ' For the present,' I say all this work in ' Proser- 
pina' being merely tentative, much to be modified by 
future students, and therefore quite different from that 
of ' Deucalion,' which is authoritative as far as it reaches, 
and will stand out like a quartz dyke, as the sandy specu- 
lations of modern gossiping geologists get washed away. 

But in the meantime, I must again solemnly warn my 
girl-readers against all study of floral genesis and diges- 
tion. IIow far flowers invite, or require, flies to inter- 
fere in their fauiily affairs — which of them are carnivo- 
rous — and what forms of pestilence or infection are most 
favourable to some vegetable and animal growths, — let 
them leave the people to settle who like, as Toinette says 



* It is, I believe, Sowerby's Viola Lutea, 721 of the old edition, there 
painted with purple upper petals ; but he says in the text, "Petals 
either all yellow, or the two uppermost are of a blue purple, the rest 
yellow with a blue tinge : very often the whole are purple." 



36 PROSERPINA. 

of the Doctor in the ' Malade Imaginaire' — "y mettre le 
nez." I observe a paper in the last ' C'Ontemporary Re- 
view,' announcing for a discovery patent to all mankind 
that the colours of flowers were made " to attract in- 
sects" ! * They will next hear that the rose was made 
for the canker, and the body of man for the worm. 

43. What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of 
precious stones, or of the sea and air, and the blue moun- 
tains, and the evening and the morning, and the clouds 
of Heaven, were given for — they only know who can 
see them and can feel, and who pray that the sight and 
the love of them may be prolonged, where cheeks will 
not fade, nor sunsets die. 

44. And now, to close, let me give you some fuller 
account of the reasons for the naming of the order to 
which the violet belongs, ' Cytherides.' 

You see that the Uranides, are, as far as I could so 
gather them, of the pure blue of the sky ; but the Cyther- 
ides of altered blue ; — the first, Viola, typically purple ; 
the second, Veronica, pale blue with a peculiar light; 
the third, Giulietta, deep blue, passing strangely into a 
subdued green before and after the full life of the 
flower. 

All these three flowers have great strangenesses in 
them, and weaknesses ; the Veronica most wonderful in 

* Did the wretch never hear bees in a lime tree then, or ever see 
one on a star gentian? 



I. VIOLA. 37 

its connection with the poisonous tribe of the foxgloves ; 
the Giulietta, alone among flowers in the action of the 
shielding leaves; and the Viola, grotesque and inexpli- 
cable in its hidden structure, but the most sacred of all 
flowers to earthly and daily Love, both in its scent and 
glow. 

Now, therefore, let us look completely for the meaning 
of the two leading lines, — 

" Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 
Or Cytherea's breath." 

45. Since, in my present writings, I hope to bring into 
one focus the pieces of study fragmentarily given during 
past life, I may refer my readers to the first chapter of 
the ' Queen of the Air' for the explanation of the way in 
which all great myths are founded, partly on physical, 
partly on moral fact, — so that it is not possible for per- 
sons who neither know the aspect of nature, nor the con- 
stitution of the human soul, to understand a word of 
them. ]S^aming the Greek gods, therefore, you have first 
to think of the physical power they represent. "When 
Horace calls Yulcan 'Avidus,' he thinks of him as the 
power of Fire ; when he speaks of Jupiter's red right 
hand, he thinks of him as the power of rain with hghtning ; 
and when Homer speaks of Juno's dark eyes, you have 
to remember that she is the softer form of the rain power, 
and to think of the fringes of the rain-cloud across the 
light of the horizon. Gradually the idea becomes per- 



38 PROSERPINA. 

sonal and human in the " Dove's eyes within thy locks," * 
and " Dove's eyes by the river of waters" of the Song of 
Solomon. 

46. " Or Cytlierea's breath," — the two thoughts of soft- 
est glance, and softest kiss, being thus together associated 
with the flower: but note especially that the Island of 
Cythera was dedicated to Venus because it was the chief, 
if not the only Greek island, in whicli the purple fishery 
of Tyre was established ; and in our own minds should 
be marked not only as the most southern fragment of 
true Greece, but the virtual continuation of the chain of 
mountains which separate the Spartan from the Argive 
territories, and are the natural home of the brightest 
Spartan and Argive beauty which is symbolized in Helen. 

47. And, lastly, in accepting for the order this name 
of Cytherides, you are to rememljer the names of Viola 
and Giulietta, its two limiting families, as those of Shak- 
speare's two most loving maids — the two who love sim- 
ply, and to the death : as distinguished from the greater 
natures in whom earthly Love has its due part, and no 
more ; and farther still from the greatest, in w^hom the 
earthly love is quiescent, or subdued, beneath the thoughts 
of duty and immortality. 

It may be well quickly to mark for you the levels of 



* Septuagint, "the eyes of doves out of thy silence." Vulgate, 
" the eyes of doves, besides that whicli is hidden in them," Meaning 
—the dim look of love, beyond all others in sweetness. 



I. VIOLA. 39 

loving temper in Shakspeare's maids and wives, from tlie 
greatest to the least. 

48. 1. Isabel. All earthly love, and the possibilities of 
it, held in absolute subjection to the laws of God, and the 
judgments of His will. She is Sliakspeare's only ' Saint.' 
Queen Catherine, whom you might next think of, is only 
an ordinary woman of trained religious temper: — her 
maid of honour gives Wolsey a more Christian epitaph. 

2. Cordelia. The earthly love consisting in diffused 
compassion of the universal spirit ; not in any conquer- 
ing, personally fixed, feeling. 

' Mine enemy's dog. 
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night 
Against my fire." 

These lines are spoken in her hour of openest direct ex- 
pression ; and are all Cordelia. 

Shakspeare clearly does not mean her to have been 
supremely beautiful in person ; it is only her true lover 
who calls her ' fair ' and ' fairest ' — and even that, I 
believe, partly in courtesy, after having the instant be- 
fore offered her to his subordinate dake ; and it is only 
his scorn of her which makes Trance fully care for her. 

" Gods, Gods, 'tis strange that from their cold neglect 
My love should kindle to inflamed respect !" 

Had she been entirely beautiful, he would have honoured 
her as a lover should, even before he saw her despised ; 



40 prosi;kp[n^a. 

noi would she ever have been so despised — or by her 
father, misunderstood. Shakspeare himself does not pre- 
tend to know where her girl-heart was, — but I should 
like to hear hov/ a great actress would say the " Peace be 
with Burgundy !" 

3. Portia. The maidenly passion now becoming great, 
and chiefly divine in its humility, is still held absolutely 
subordinate to duty ; no thought of disobedience to her 
dead father's intention is entertained for an instant, though 
the temptation is marked as passing, for that instant, be- 
fore her crystal strength. Instantly, in her own peace, 
she thinks chiefly of her lover's ; — she is a perfect Chris- 
tian wife in a moment, coming to her husband with the 
gift of perfect Peace, — 

" Never shall you lie by Portia's side 
With an unquiet soul." 

She is highest in intellect of all Shakspeare's women, 
and this is the root of her modesty ; her ' unlettered girl' 
is like ISTewton's simile of the child on the sea-shore. 
Her perfect wit and stern judgment are never disturbed 
for an instant by her happiness : and the final key to her 
character is given in her silent and slow return from 
Venice, where she stops at everj^ wayside shrine to pray. 

4. Hermione. Fortitude and Justice personified, with 
unwearying affection. She is Penelope, tried by her hus- 
band's fault as well as error. 

5. Yirgilia. Perfect type of wife and mother, but 



I. VIOLA. 41 

"uitliout clefiuiteness of character, nor quite strength of 
intellect enough entirely to hold her husband's heart. 
Else, she had saved him: he would have left Rome in his 
wrath — but not her. "Therefore, it is his mother only 
who bends him : but she cannot save. 

6. Imogen. The ideal of grace and gentleness ; but 
weak ; enduring too mildly, and forgiving too easily. 
But the piece is rather a pantomime than play, and it is 
impossiI)le to judge of the feelings of St. Columba, when 
she must leave the stage in half a minute after mistaking 
the headless clown for headless Arlecchino. 

7. Desdemona, Ophelia, Rosalind. They are under 
different conditions from all the rest, in having entirely 
heroic and faultless persons to love, I can't class them, 
therefore, — fate is too strong, and leaves them no free 
will. 

8. Perdita, Miranda. Rather mythic visions of maiden 
beauty than mere girls. 

9. Viola and Juliet. Love the ruling power in the en- 
tire character: wholly virginal and pure, but quite earth- 
ly, and recognizing no other life than his own. Viola is, 
however, far the noblest. Juliet will die unless Romeo 
loves her: " If he be wed, the grave is like to be my wed- 
ding bed ;" but Viola is ready to die for the happiness 
of the man who does ?iot love her ; faithfully doing his 
messages to her rival, whom she examines strictly for his 
sake. It is not in envy that she says, " Excellently done, 
— if God did all." The key to her character is given in 



42 riiOdiiuPiNA. 

the least selfisli of all lover's songs, the one to which the 
Duke bids her listen : 

" Mark it, Cesario, — it is old and plain, 
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, 
And the free maids, that weave their thread with bones. 
Do use to chaunt it." 

(They, the unconscious Fates, weaving the fair vanity of 
life with death) ; and the burden of it is — 

" My part of Death, no one so true 
Did share it." 

Therefore she says, in the great first scene, " Was not 
^^^5 love indeed ?" and in the less heeded closing one, 
her heart then happy with the knitters in the sun, 

" And all those sayings will 1 over-swear. 
And all those swearings keep as true in soul 
As doth that orbed continent the Fire 
That severs day from night. " 

Or, at least, did once sever day from night, — and perhaps 
does still in Illyria. Old England must seek new images 
for her loves from gas and electric sparks, — not to say 
furnace fire. 

I am obliged, by press of other work, to set down these 
notes in cruel shortness : and many a reader may be dis- 
posed to question utterly the standard by which the 
measurement is made. It will not be found, on reference 



I. VIOLA. 43 

to my other books, that they encourage young ladies to 
go into convents ; or undervalue the dignity of wives and 
mothers. But, as surely as the sun does sever day from 
night, it will be found always that the noblest and love- 
liest women are dutiful and religious by continual nature ; 
and their passions are trained to obey them ; like their 
dogs. Homer, indeed, loves Helen with all his heart, 
and restores her, after all her naughtiness, to tlie queen- 
ship of her household ; but he never thinks of her as 
Penelope's equal, or Iphigenia's. Practically, in daily 
life, one often sees married women as good as saints ; but 
rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from 
their husbands. Sometimes also, no doubt, the husbands 
have some trouble in managing St, Cecilia or St. Eliza- 
beth ; of which questions 1 shall be obliged to speak 
more seriously in another place : content, at present, if 
English maids know better, by Proserpina's help, what 
Shakspeare meant by the dim, and Milton by the glowing, 
violet. 



CHAPTER 11. 

PINGDICDLA. 
(Written in early June, 1881.) 

1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or 
leaps, through the moorland, the common Pinguicula is 
now in its perfectest beauty ; and it is one of the off- 
shoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the 
minor collateral groups of Yiola very soon, and must not 
put off looking at it till next year. 

There are three varieties given in Sowerbj : 1. Vul- 
garis, 2. Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for 
the most part, pink, or ' carnea,' sometimes : but the 
proper colour of the family is violet, and the perfect 
form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger- 
flowered variety is feebler in colour, and ruder in form : 
the white Spanish one, however, is very lovely, as far as 
I can judge from Sowerby's {pld Sowerby's) pretty draw- 
ing. 

The ' frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate ' vul- 
garis'), is not by any means so 'frequent' as the Queen 
violet, being a true wild-country, and mostly Alpine, 
plant ; and there is also a real ' Pinguicula Alpina,' 



II. PINGUICULA. 45 

which we have not in England, who might be the Ee- 
gina, if tlie group were large enough to be reigned over : 
but it is better not to affect Koyalty among these con- 
fused, intermediate, or dependent fauiilie^. 

2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has 
one stalk onlv, growing from the ground ; and you may 
pull all the leaves away from the base of it, and keep 
tlic flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous roots, 
half an inch long ; looking as if bitten at the ends. 
Two flowers, characteristically, — three and four very 
often, — spring from the sauie root, in places where it 
grows luxuriantly ; and luxuriant growth means that 
clusters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on 
the surface of a square yard of boggy ground, quite to 
its mind; but its real glory is in harder life, in the cran- 
nies of well-wetted rock. 

3. What I have called ' stars ' are irregular cbisters of 
approximately, or tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, 
of very pale green, — they may be six or seven, or more, 
but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement, 
essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. 
Taken as a whole the j9Z«7i^ is really a main link between 
violets and Droseras; but the flower has much more 
violet than Drosera in the make of it, — spurred, and^w- 
petaled,^ and held down by the top of its bending stalk 

* AVhcn I have the chance, and the time, to submit the proofs of 
* Proserpina ' to friends who know more of Botany than I, or have 



46 PROSERPmA. 

as a violet is ; only its upper two petals are not reverted 
— the calyx, of a dark soppy green, holding them down, 
with its three front sepals set exactly like a strong tri- 
dent, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There 



kindness enough to ascertain debateable things for me, I mean in 
future to do so, — using the letter A to signify Amicus, generally; 
with acknowledgment by name, when it is permitted, of especial 
help or correction. Note first of this kind: I find here on this word, 
' five-petaled,' as applied to Pinguicula, " Qy. two-lipped? it is mono- 
petalous, and monosepalous, the calyx and corolla being each all in 
one piece." 

Yes ; and I am glad to have the observation inserted. But my 
term, * five petal ed,' must stand. For the question with me is always 
first, not how the petals are connected, but how many they are. 
Also I have accepted the term petal — but never the word lip — as ap- 
plied to flowers. The generic term ' Labiatse ' is cancelled in ' Pro- 
serpina,' 'Vestales' being substituted; and these flowers, when I come 
to examine them, arc to be described, not as divided into two lips, 
but into hood, apron, and side-pockets. Farther, the depth to which 
either calyx or corolla is divided, and the firmness with which the 
petals are attached to the torus, may, indeed, often be an unportant 
part of the plant's description, but ought not to be elements in its 
definition. Three petaled and three-sepaled, four-petaled and four- 
sepaled, five-petaled and five-sepaled, etc., etc., are essential — with 
me, primal — elements of definition; next, whether resolute or stellar 
in their connection; next, whether round or pointed, etc. Fancy, 
for instance, the fatality to a rose of pointing its petals, and to a lily, 
of rounding them! But how deep cut, or how hard holding, is 
quite a minor question. 

Farther, that all plants are petaled and sepaled, and never mere 
cups in saucers, is a great fact, not to be dwelt on in a note. 



II. PINGUICULA. 47 

are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal 
number is five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the 
flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his 
prey by the loins if he missed its throat ; the blue petals 
being really campanulate, and the flower best described 
as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its 
own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now also the upper 
]ietals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and 
well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the 
lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the 
point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this 
centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an 
iri'egular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly 
like the wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white 
Lucia.* 

4. The calyx is of a dark soppy green, I said ; like 
that of sugary preserved citron ; the root leaves are of 
green just as soppy, but pale and yellownsh, as if they 
were half decayed ; the edges curled up and, as it were, 
water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long 
in water. And the whole plant looks as if it had been a 
violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live 
there — not for its own sins, but for some Emperor 
Pansy's, far away in the garden, — in a jxirtly hoggish, 

* Our ' Lucia Nivea,' ' Blanche Lucy; ' in present botany, Bog 
bean! having no connection whatever with any manner of bean, but 
only a slight resemblance to bean-^taics in its own lower ones. Com- 
pare Ch. rv. § 11. 



4-8 PROSE K PIN A. 

partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with 
something of demoniac temper got into its caljx, so that 
it quarrels with, and bites the corolla ;^something of 
gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a dis- 
comfortahle sensnality, even in its desolation. Perhaps 
a penguin ish life would be truer of it than a piggish, 
the oust of it being indeed on the rock, or morassy rock- 
investiture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge. 

5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, 
namely, Loudon's Encyclopsedia, Balfour, Grindon, Oli- 
ver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley (' Ladies' Botany '), and 
Figuier, without being able to find the meaning of ' Len- 
tibulariacese,' to wliich tribe the Pinguicnla is said by 
them all (except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be 
in Sowerby :* but these above-named treatises are pre- 
cisely of the kind with which the ordinary scholar must 
be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long, 
worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed 
into classing together two orders naturally quite distinct, 
the Butterworts and the Bladderworts. 

Whatever the name may mean — it is bad Latin. 
There is such a word as Lenticularis — there is no Lenti- 
bularis ; and it must positively trouble us no longer.f 



* It is not. (Resolute negative from A., unsparing of time for me; 
and what a state of things it all signifies !) 

f With the following three notes, * A ' must become a definitely and 
gratefully interpreted letter. I am indebted for the first, conclusive 




II. PINGUICULA. 

The Butterworts are a perfectly dietinct gpoTip — 
whether small or large, always recognizable at a glance. 
Their proper Latin name will be Pinguicula, (plural 
Pinguiculse,) — their English, Bog-Violet, or, more fa- 
miliarly, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, 
Grassette. 

in itself, but variously supported and confirmed by the two following, 
to R. J. Mann, Esq., M.D., long ago a pupil of Dr. Lindley's, and 
now on the council of Whitelands College, Chelsea: — for the second, 
to Mr. Thomas Moore, F.L.S., the kind Keeper of the Botanic Gar- 
den at Chelsea; for the third, which will be farther on useful to us, 
to Miss Kemm, the botanical lecturer at Whitelands. 

(1) There is no exijlanalion of Lentibulariacese in Lindley's 'Vege- 
table Kingdom.' He was not great in that line. The term is, how- 
ever, taken from Lenticula, the lentil, in allusion to the lentil-shaped 
air-bladders of the typical genus Utrieularia. 

The change of the c into b may possibly have been made only 
from some euphonic fancy of the contriver of the name, who, I 
think, was Rich. 

But I somewhat incline myself to think that the tibia, a pipe or 
flute, may have had something to do with it. The tibia may possibly 
have been diminished into a little pipe by a stretch of licence, and 
have become tibula: [but tibulus is a kind of pine tree in Pliny]; 
when Len tibula would be the lens or lentil-shaped pipe or bladder. 
I give you this only for what it is worth. The lenticula, as a deriva- 
tion, is reliable and has authority. 

Lenticula, a lentil, a freckly eruption; lenticidaiHs, lentil- shaped; 
so the nat. ord. ought to be (if this be right) lenticulariacecB. 

(2) Botanic Gardens, Chelsea, Feb. 14, 1882. 
Lentibularia is an old generic name of Tournefort's, which has 

been supei-seded by utrieularia, but, oddly enough, has been retained 
4 



50 PROSERPINA. 

The families to be remembered will be only five, 
namely, 

1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As 
bog plants, Ireland may rightly claim the noblest of 
them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly, and not (I 
believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken 
and less characteristic than that of the following 
species. 

2. Pinguicula Violacea: Yiolet-coloured Butterwort, 
(instead of ' vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss 
kind above noticed. 

3. Pinguicula Alpina : Alpine Butterwort, white and 
much smaller than either of the first two families ; the 

in the name of the order lentibularew ; but it probally comes from 
lenticula, which signifies the little root bladders, somewhat resem- 
bling lentils, 
(3) ' Manual of Scientific Terms,' Stormonth, p. 234 
Leniibulanaceo}, neuter, plural. 

{Lenticula, the shape of a lentil; from lens, a lentil.) The But- 
terwort family, an order of plants so named from the lenticu- 
lar shape of the air-bladders on the branches of utricularia, 
one of the genera. (But observe that the Buttencorts have 
nothing of the sort, any of them. — R.) 
Loudon. — " Floaters." 

Lindley. — " Sometimes with whorled vesicles." 
In Nuttall's Standard (?) Pronouncing Dictionary, it is given, — 
Lenticular ece, a nat. ord. of marsh plants, which thrive in water 
or marshes. 



II. PINGUICULA. 51 

spur especially small, according to D. 453. Much rarer, 
as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern 
Europe. ""In Britain, known only upon the moors of 
Rosehaugh, Ross-shire, where the progress of cultivation 
seems likely soon to efface it." (Grindon.) 

4. Pi nguicula Pallida: Pale Butterwort. From So w- 
erhy's drawing, (135, vol. iii.,) it would appear to be the 
most delicate and lovely of all the group. The leaves, 
'' like those of other species, but rather more delicate 
and pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much in- 
volute in the margin. Tube of the corolla, yellow, 
streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a pansy) ; 
the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our 
Minima, No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being 
hairy, and in the lower part the hairs tipped with a 
viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a 
slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and 
thick at the end." (Since the hairy stem is not peculiar 
to Yillosa, I take for her, instead, the epithet Minima, 
which is really definitive.) 

The pale one is commonly called ' Lusitanica,' but I 
find no direct notice of its Portuguese habitation. Sow- 
erby's plant came from Blandford, Dorsetshire ; and 
Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Ar- 
ran, and extends on the western side of the British island 
from Cornwall to Cape Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is 
secure, and simple, wherever the plant is found. 



52 PROSERPINA. 

5. Pinguicula Minima : Least Biitterwort ; in D, 1021 
called Villosa, the scape of it being liairy. I have not 

yet got rid of this absurd word ' scape,' 
meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk 
of a flower growing out of a cluster of leaves 
on the ground. It is a bad corruption of 
* sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, be- 
cause a true sceptre is necessarily branched.* 
In ■■ Proserpina,' when it is spoken of dis- 
tinctively, it is called ' virgula ' (see vol. i., 
pp. 146, 147, 151, 152). The hairs on the vir- 
gula are in this instance so minute, that even 
with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish 
plate : of which Fig. 3 is a rough transla- 
tion into -s^oodcut, to show the grace and 
Fig. 1X1. mien of the little thing. The trine leaf 
cluster is characteristic, and the folding up of the leaf 
edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. 
Abundant in east of Finmarh (Finland?), but always 
growing in marsh moss, (Sphagnum palustre). 

6. I call it ' Minima' only, as the least of the five here 
named ; without putting forward any claim for it to be 
the smallest pinguicula that ever was or will be. In 
such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to, 
be understood when used in ' Proserpina ' : and so also, 

* More accurately, shows the pruned roots of branches, — tTteiS?) 
TTftdora To/iT^v kv op£66i XiXoiitEv. The pruning is the mythic 
expression of the subduing of passion by rectorial law. 




II. PINGUICULA. 53 

every statement and every principle is only to be under- 
stood as true or tenable, respecting the plants which the 
writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader 
can easily see : liable to modification to any extent by 
wider experience ; but better first learned securely with- 
in a nari'ow fence, and afterwards trained or fructified, 
along more complex trellises. 

7. And indeed my readers — at least, my newly found 
readers — must note always that the only power which 
I claim for any of my books, is that of being right and 
true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be 
Kosmoses ; — none to be systems of Positivism or Nega- 
tivism, on which the earth is in future to swing instead 
of on its old worn-out poles ; — none of them to be works 
of genins ; — none of them to be, more than all true work 
must be, pious ; — and none to be, beyond the power of 
common people's eyes,* ears, and noses, 'aesthetic' 
They tell you that the world is so big, and can't be made 
bigger — that you yourself are also so big, and can't be 
made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself ; but 
that, on modern mental nourishment, you may very 
easily be made smaller. They tell you that two and two 
are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are 
red, and smuts black. Not themselves assuming to be 

* The bitter soitow with which I first recognized the extreme rarity 
of finely-developed organic sight is expressed enough in the lecture 
on the Mystery of Life, added in the large edition of ' Sesame and 
Liilies.' 



54 PROSERPINA. 

pious, ttey yet assure you that there is such a thing as 
piety in the world, and that it is wiser than impiety ; and 
not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they 
yet assure you that there is such a thing as genius in the 
world, and that it is meant for the light and delight of 
the world. 

8. Into these repetitions of remarks on my work, 
often made before, I have been led by an unlucky author 
who has just sent me his book, advising me that it is 
"neither critical nor sentimental" (he had better have 
said in plain English " without either judgment or feel- 
ing"), and in which nearly the first sentence I read is — • 
" Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise enough to 
. . , etc., etc., etc." (' give the Jews the British consti- 
tution,' I believe the man means.) He is not a whit 
more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer^ or Mr. Gold- 
win Smith, or Professor Tyndall, — or any lively London 
apprentice out on a Sunday ; but this general supercili- 
ousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his 
politics, characteristic of the modem Cockney, Yankee, 
and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for 
us of the old school, who were well whipped when we 
were young ; and have been in the habit of occasionally 
ascertaining our own levels as we grew older, and of 
recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, 
and struck harder. 

9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and 
more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to 



II. PINGUICULA. 55 

write ; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even 
every word I use^ being alike inconceivable to the inso- 
lence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern 
London writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I 
found an article by Mr. Gold win Smith on the Jews (of 
which the gist — as far as it had any — was that we had 
better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of 
which I found the word ' tribal ' repeated about ten times 
in every page. J^Tow, if 'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube 
must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal ; and I 
suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal min- 
erals, and gibal conversation ! And observe how all this 
bad English leads instantly to blunder in thought, pro- 
longed indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not separate 
races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman 
Tribes, political divisions ; essentially Trine : and the 
whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as soon as the 
ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation by 
the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of 
mineralogy I took up. the first order of crystals was 
called ' tesseral ' ; the writer being much too fine to call 
them 'four-al,' and too much bent on distinguishing 
himself from all previous writers to call them cubic. 

10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible school- 
masters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, 
which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more 
with any hope or patience conceive ; — but this finally I 
repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written 



56 PROSEEPIK"A. 

in tonest English, of good Johnsonian h'neage, touched 
here and there with colour of a little finer or Elizabethan 
quality : and that the things they tell you are compre- 
hensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent 
person ; and accurate, to a degree which the accepted 
methods of modern science cannot, in my own particular 
fields, approach. 

11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for 
immediate instance, my extrication for him, from among 
the uvularias, of these five species of the Butterwort; 
which, being all that need be distinctly named and re- 
membered, do need to be first carefully distinguished, 
and then remembered in their companionship. So alike 
are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among them ; 
but masses them under the general type of the frequent 
English one, described as the second kind of his promis- 
cuous group of ' Sanicle,' " which Clusius calleth Pingui- 
cula ; not before his time remembered, hath sundry small 
thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards 
the root and sharp towards the point, of a faint green 
colour, and bitter in taste ; out of the middest whereof 
sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine 
inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, 
sometimes white, and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, 
fashioned like unto the common Monkshoods" (he means 
Larkspurs) " called Consolida Regalis, having the like spur 
or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describ- 
ing a third kind of Sanicle — (Cortusa Mathioli, a large- 



11. PINGUICULA. 57 

leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on : " These plants are 
strangers in England ; their natural country is the alpisli 
raonntaius of Helvetia. They grow in mj garden, where 
they jtlourish exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which 
groweth in our English squally wet grounds," — (' Squally,' 
I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not 
give this sense ; but one of his quotations from Ben Jon- 
son touches it nearly : " Take heed that their new flow- 
ers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' 
dryness and squalor," — and note farther that the word 
' squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but tlie 
Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed: — the English word, 
a form of ' squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 
' Squgela ' and Icelandic ' squilla,' would scarcely have 
been made an adjective by Gerarde), — " and will not yield 
to any culturing or transplanting : it growetli especially 
in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravens- 
waithe, in Westmerland ; (West-m^'^'^-land you observe, 
not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from 
Lancaster, and by Harwoode in the same county near to 
Blackburn : ten miles from Preston, in Anderness, upon 
the bogs and marisli ground, and in the boggie meadows 
about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way 
to Wittles Meare" (Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere f) 
"from Fendon, in Huntingdonshire." Where doubt- 
less Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, piti- 
lessly : and in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen 
daisy. 



58 PROSERPINA. 

12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its Eng- 
lish name of ' Butterwort ' as true Yorkshire, the more 
enigmatic form of ' Pigwilly ' preserving the tradition of 
the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin name, 
in Pigwilly bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. 
Gerarde draws the English variety as " Pinguicula sive 
Sanicula Eboracensis, — Butterwoort, or Yorkshire Sani- 
cle ;" and he adds: "The husbandmen's wives of York- 
shire do use to anoint the dugs of tlieir kine with the fat 
and oilous juice of the herb Butterwort when they be 
bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted and 
hurt by any other means." 

13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use ; 
"it is called Tiitgrass, and the leaves are used by the in- 
habitants to make their ' tat miolk,' a preparation of milk 
in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid 
upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is 
poured over them. After passing quickly through tlie 
Alter, this is allowed to rest for one or two days until it 
becomes ascescent,* when it is found not to have sepa- 
rated from the whey, and yet to have attained much 
greater tenacity and consistence than it would have done 
otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes are said to be 
extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it 
is not necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are 
told that a spoonful of it will turn another quantity of 

* Lat. acesco, to turn sour. 



II. PINGUICULA. 59 

warm milk, and make it like the first." ^ (Baxtet-, vol, 
iii., No. 209.) 

14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's 
observation that "when specimens of this plant were 
somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk, previously 
erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, 
and formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; 
and so also, if a specimen is placed in the Botanic box, 
you will in a short time find that the leaves have curled 
themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by their 
revolution." 

I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is 
partly connected with the plant's more or less predatory 
or fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded 
plants are associated with Drosera. I separate them 
therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them 
to be a link between the Violets and the Droseracese, 

* Withering quotes this as from Linnaeus, and adds on authority 
of a Mr. Hawkes, " This did not succeed when tried with cows' milk." 
He also gives as another name, Yorkshire Sanicle ; and says it is 
called earning grass in Scotland. Linnaeus says the juice will curdle 
reindeer's milk. The name for rennet is earning, in Lincolnshire. 
Withering also gives this note : " Pinguis, fat, from its effect in con- 
gealing milk." — (A.) Withering of course wrong : the name comes, 
be the reader finally assured, from the fatness of the green leaf, quite 
peculiar among wild plants, and fastened down for us in the French 
word ' Grassette.' I have found the flowers also difficult to dry, in the 
benighted early times when I used to think a dried plant useful 1 See 
closing paragraphs of the 4th chapter. — R. 



60 PROSERPINA. 

placing them, however, with the Ojtherides, as a sub- 
family, for their beautiful colour, and because they are 
indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for 
them, would be painfully and rudely desolate. 



CHAPTEE III. 



VERONICA. 



1. " The Corolla of the Foxglove," says Dr. Lindley, 
beginning his account of the tribe at page 195 of the 
first volume of his ' Ladies' Botany,' " is a large inflated 
body (!), with its throat spotted with ricli purple, and its 
border divided obliquely into five very short lobes, of 
which the two upper are the smaller ; its four stamens 
are of unequal length, and its style is divided into two 
lobes at the upper end. A number of long hairs cover 
the ovary, which contains two cells and a great quantity 
of ovules. 

" This" {sc. information) " will show you what is the 
usual character of the Foxglove tribe ; and you will find 
that all the other genera referred to it in books agree with 
it essentially, although they differ in subordinate points. 
It is chiefly (A) in the form of the corolla, (B) in the 
number of the stamens, (C) in the consistence of the rind 
of the fruit, (D) in its form, (E) in the number of the 
seeds it contains, and (F) in the manner in which the 
sepals are combined, that these differences consist." 

2. The enumerative letters are of my insertion — other- 
wise the above sentence is, word for word. Dr. Lindley's, 
^— and it seems to me an interesting and memorable one 



62 PROSERPINA. 

in tlie history of modern Botanical science. For it ap~ 
pears from the tenor of it, that in a scientiiic botanist's 
mind, six particulars, at least, in the character of a plant, 
are merely ' subordinate points,' — namely, 

1. (F) The combination of its calyx, 

2. (A) The shape of its corolla, 

3. (B) The number of its stamens, 

4. (D) The form of its fruit, 

5. (C) The consistence of its shell, — and 

6. (E) The number of seeds in it. 

Abstracting, then, from the primary description, all the 
six inessential points, I find the three essential ones left 
are, that the style is divided into two lobes at the upper 
end, that a number of glandular hairs cover the ovary, 
and that this latter contains two cells, 

3. None of which particulars concern any reasonable 
mortal, looking at a Foxglove, in the smallest degree. 
"Whether hairs which he can't see are glandular or bristly, 
— whether the green knobs, which are left when the pur- 
ple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hun- 
dred, — and whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, 
into two lobes, or like a rogue's, into any number — are 
merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which he needs a mi- 
croscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in 
discovering. But if any pretty young Proserpina, es- 
caped from the Plutonic durance of London, and carried 
by the tubular process, which Replaces Charon's boat, over 



III. VERONICA. 63 

the Lune at Lancaster, cares to come and walk on the 
Couiston hills in a summer morning, when the eyebright 
is out on the high fields, she may gather, with a little 
help from Brantwood garden, a bouquet of the entire 
Foxglove tribe in flower, as it is at present defined, and 
may see what they are like, altogether. 

4. Slie shall gather : first, the Euphrasy, which makes 
the turf on the brow of the hill glitter as if with new- 
fallen manna ; then, from one of the blue clusters on the 
top of the garden wall, the common bright blue Speed- 
well ; and, from the garden bed beneath, a dark blue 
spire of A^erouica spicata ; then, at the nearest opening 
into tlie wood, a little foxglove in its first delight of 
shaking out its bells ; then — what next does the Doctor 
say ? — a snapdragon ? we must go back into the garden 
for that — here is a goodly crimson one, but what the 
little speedwell will think of him for a relative / can't 
think! — a mullein? — that we must do without for the 
moment ; a monkey flower ? — that we will do without, 
altogether ; a lady's slipper ? — say rather a goblin's with 
the gout ! but. such as the flower-cobbler has made it, 
here is one of the kind that people praise, out of the 
greenhouse, — and yet a figwort we must have, too ; 
which I see on referring to Loudon, may be balm-leaved, 
hemp-leaved, tansy -leaved, nettle-leaved, wing-leaved, 
heart-leaved, ear-leaved, spear-leaved, or lyre-leaved, I 
think I can find a balm-leaved one, though I don't know 
what to make of it when I've got it, but it's called a 



64 PKOSERPINA. 

' Scorodonia ' in Sower by, and sonietliing very ugly be- 
sides; — I'll put a bit of Teucrium Scorodonia in, to 
finish : and now — how will my young Proserpina arrange 
her bouquet, and rank the family j'elations to their con- 
tentment ? 

5. She has only one land of flowers in her hand, as 
botanical classification stands at present ; and whether 
the system be more rational, or in an\' human sense more 
scientific, which puts calceolaria and speedwejl together, 
— and foxglove and euphrasy ; and runs tliem on one 
side into the mints, and on the other into the night- 
shades ; — naming them, meanwhile, some from diseases, 
some from vermin, some from blockheads, and the rest 
anyhow : — or the method I am pleading for, which 
teaches us, watchful of their seasonable return and chosen 
abiding places, to associate in our memory the flowers 
which truly resemble, or fondly companion, or, in time 
kept by the signs of Heaven, succeed, each other ; and 
to name them in some historical connection with the 
loveliest fancies and most helpful faiths of the ancestral 
world — Proserpina be judge ; with every maid that sets 
flowers on brow or breast — fi'om Thule to Sicily, 

f«. We v/ill unbind our bouquet, then, and putting all 
the rest of its flowers aside, examine the range and nature 
of the little blue cluster only. 

And first — we have to note of it, that the plan of the 
blossom in all the kinds is the same ; an irregular quatre- 
foil : and irregular quatrefoils are of extreme rarity in 



III. VERONICA. 65 

flower form. I don't myself know one, except tlie Yeron- 
ica. The cruciform vegetables — the heaths, the olives, 
the lilacs, the little Tormentillas, and the poppies, are all 
perfectly sjrauietrical. Two of the petals, indeed, as a 
rule, are different from the other two, except in the 
heaths ; and thus a distinctly crosslet form obtained, but 
always an equally balanced one : while in the Yeronica, 
as in the Yiolet, the blossom always refers itself to a 
supposed place on the stalk with respect to the ground ; 
and the upper jDetal is always the largest. 

The supposed place is often very suppositious indeed 
— for clusters of the common veronicas, if luxuriant, 
throw their blossoms about anywhere. But the idea of 
an upper and lower petal is always kept in the flower's 
little mind. 

7. In the second place, it is a quite open and flat 
quatrefoil — so separating itself from the belled quadrar 
ture of the heath, and the tubed and primrose-like quad- 
rature of the cruciferae ; and, both as a quatrefoil, and as 
an open one, it is separated from the foxgloves and snap- 
dragons, which are neither quatref oils, nor open ; but are 
cinqfoils shut up ! 

8. In the third place, open and flat though the flower 
be, it is monopetalous ; all the four arms of the cross 
strictly becoming one in the centre ; so that, though the 
blue foils look no less sharply separate than those of a 
buttercup or a cistus ; and are so delicate that one ex- 
pects them to fall from their stalk if we breathe too 



66 PKOSERPIFA. 

near, — do but lay hold of one, — and, at the touch, the 
entire blossom is lifted from its stalk, and may be laid, 
in perfect shape, on our paper before us, as easily as if 
it had been a nicely made-up blue bonnet, lifted off its 
stand by the milliner. 

I pause here, to consider a little ; because I find myself 
mixing up two characteristics which have nothing neces- 
sary in their relation ; — namely, the unity of the blossom, 
and its coming easily off the stalk. The separate petals of 
the cistus and cherry fall as easily as the foxglove drops 
its bells; — on the other hand, there are monopetalous 
things that don't drop, but hold on like the convolnta,* 
and make the rest of the tree sad for their dying. I do 
not see my way to any systematic noting of decadent or 
persistent corolla ; but, in passing, we may thank the 
veronica for never allowing us to see how it fades,f and 
being always cheerful and lovely, while it is with us. 

9. And for a farther specialty, I think we should take 
note of the purity and simplicity of \i% floral blue, not 



* I find mucli more difHculty, myself, being old, in using my al- 
tered names for species than my young scholars will. In watching 
the bells of the purple bindweed fade at evening, let tliem leam the 
fourth verse of the prayer of Hezekiah, as it is in the Vulgate — 
" Generatio mea ablata est, et convoluta est a me, sicut tabernaculum 
pastoris," — and they will not forget the name of the fast-fading — ever 
renewed — " belle dun jour." 

f " It is Miss Cobbe, I think, v?ho says ' all wild flovrers know how 
to die gi'acefully.' " — A. 



III. VEROXICA. 67 

sprinkling itself with unwholesome sugar like a larkspur, 
nor varying into coppery or turquoise-like hue as the 
forget-me-not; but keeping itself as modest as a blue 
print, pale, in the most frequent kinds ; but pure exceed- 
ingly ; and rejoicing in fellowship with the grey of its 
native rocks. The palest of all I think it will be well 
to remember as Veronica Clara, the "Poor Clare" of 
Veronicas. I find this note on it in my diary, — 

' The flower of an exquisite grey-white, like lichen, or 
shaded hoar-frost, or dead silver ; making the long- 
weathered stones it grew upon perfect with a finished 
modesty of paleness, as if the flower could be bb.ie, and 
would not, for their sake. Laying its fine small leaves 
along in embroidery, like Anagallis tenella, — indescrib- 
able in the tender feebleness of it — afterwards as it grew, 
dropping the little blossoms from the base of the spire, 
before the buds at the top liad blown. Gathered, it was 
happy beside me, with a little water under a stone, and 
put out one pale blossom after another, day by day.' 

10. Lastly, and for a high worthiness, in my estimate, 
note th'it it is vyild^ of tlie wildest, and proud in pure 
descent of race ; submitting itself to no follies of the 
cur-breeding florist. Its species, though many resem- 
bling each other, are severally constant in aspect, and 
easily recognizable ; and I have never seen it provoked 
to glare into any gigantic impudence at a flower show. 
Fortunately, perhaps, it is scentless, and so despised. 

11. Before I attempt arranging its families, we must 



68 PKOSERPINA. 

note that while the corolla itself is one of the most con- 
stant in form, and so distinct from all other blossoms 
that it may be always known at a glance ; the leaves and 
habit of growth vary so greatly in families of different 
climates, and those born for special situations, moist or 
dry, and the like, that it is quite impossible to character- 
ize Veronic, or Veronique, vegetation in general terms. 
One can say, comfortably, of a strawberry, that it is a 
creeper, without expecting at the next moment to see a 
steeple of strawberry blossoms rise to couti'adict us ; — we 
can venture to say of a foxglove that it grows in a spire, 
without any danger of finding, farther on, a carpet of 
prostrate and entangling digitalis; and we may pro- 
nounce of a buttercup that it grows mostly in meadows, 
without fear of finding ourselves, at the edge of the next 
thicket, under the shadow of a butterciip-bush growing 
into valuable timber. But the Yeronica reclines with 
the lowly,* upon occasion, and aspires, with the proud ; 
is here the pleased companion of the ground-ivies, and 
there the un rebuked rival of the larkspurs : on the rocks 
of Coniston it effaces itself almost into the film of a 
lichen ; it pierces the snows of Iceland with the gentian : 
and in the Falkland Islands is a white-blossomed ever- 
green, of which botanists are in dispute whether it be 
Yeronica or Olive. 



* See distinction between recumbent and rampant herbs, below, 
under ' Veronica Agrestis,' p. 73. 



III. VERONICA. €9 

12. Of these many and various forms, I find the man- 
ners and customs alike inconstant; and this of especially 
singular in them — that the Alpine and northern species 
bloom hardily in contest with the retiring snows, while 
with us they wait till the spring is past, and offer them- 
selves to us only in consolation for the vanished violet 
and primrose. As we farther examine the ways of 
plants, I suppose we shall find some that determine upon 
a fixed season, and will bloom methodically in June or 
July, whether in Abyssinia or Greenland; and others, 
like the violet and crocus, which are flowers of the spring, 
at whatever time of the favouring or frowning year the 
spring returns to their country. I suppose also that 
botanists and gardeners know all these matters thorough- 
ly : but they don't put them into their books, and the 
clear notions of them only come to me now, as I think 
and watch. 

13. Broadly, however, the families of the Yeronica 
fall into three main divisions, — those which have round 
leaves lobed at the edge, like ground ivy ; those which 
have small thyme-like leaves ; and those which have long 
leaves like a foxglove's, only smaller — never more than 
two or two and a half inches long. I therefore take tbem 
in these connections, though without any bar between 
the groups ; only separating the Regina from the other 
thymedeaved ones, to give her due precedence ; and the 
rest will then arrange themselves into twenty families, 
easily distinguishable and memorable. 



70 



PKOSERPINA. 



I have chosen for Veronica Regina, the brave Ice- 
landic one, which pierces the snow in first spring, with 
lovely small shoots of perfectly set leaves, no larger than 




Fig. rV. 



a grain of wheat ; the flowers in a lifted cluster of five or 
six together, not crowded, yet not loose ; large, for ve- 
ronica — about the size of a silver penny, or say half an 
inch across — deep blue, with ruby centre. 



III. VERONICA. 71 

My woodcut, Fig. 4, is outlined * from the beautiful 
engraving D. 342,f — there called ' fruticulosa,' from the 
number of the young shoota 

14. Beneath the Regina, come the twenty easily dis- 
tinguished families, namely : — 

1. Chamsedrys. ' Ground-oak.' I cannot tell why so 
called — its small and rounded Jeaves having nothing like 
oak leaves about them, except the serration, which is 
common to half, at least, of all leaves that grow. But 



* 'Abstracted' rather, I should have said, and with perfect skill, 
by Mr. Collingwood (the joint translator of Xenophon's Economics 
for the ' Bibliotheca Pastorum '). So also the next following cut, 
Fig. 5. 

f Of the references, henceforward necessary to the books I have 
used as authorities, the reader will please note the following abbrevi- 
ations r — 

C. Curtis's Magazine of Botany. 

D. Flora Danica. 

F. Figuier. 

G. Sibthorpe's Flora Graeca. 

L. Linnaeus. Systema Naturae. 

L. S. Linnaeus's Flora Suecica. But till we are quite used to the 

other letters, I print this reference in words. 
L. K. William Curtis's Flora Londinensis. Of the exquisite plates 

engraved for this book by James Sowerby, note is taken in 

the close of next chapter, 
O. Sowerby's English Wild Flowers ; the old edition in thirty-two 

thin volumes — far the best. 
S. Sowerby's English Wild Flowers ; the modem edition in ten 

voliunes. 



73 PROSERPINA. 

tlie idea is all over Europe, apparently. Fr. 'petit 
chene : ' German and English ' Germander,' a merely 
corrupt form of Cliamsedrjs. 

The representative Euglish veronica "Germander 
Sj)eedwell" — very prettily drawn in S. 986 ; too tall and 
weed-like in D. 448. 

2. Hederifolia. Ivy-leaved : but more properly, cym- 
balaria-leaved. It is the English field representative, 
though blue-flowered, of the Byzantine white veronica, 
Y. Cymbalaria, very beautifully drawn in G. 9. Hederi- 
folia well in D. 428. 

3. Agrestis. Fr. ' Rustique.' "We ought however 
clearly to understand whether ' agrestis,' used by English 
botanists, is meant to imjDly a literally field flower, or 
only a 'rustic' one, which might as properly grow in a 
wood. I shall always myself use ' agrestis ' in the literal 
sense, and 'rustica' for 'rastiqne.' I see no reason, in 
the present case, for separating the Polite from the Rus- 
tic flower : the agrestis, D. 449 and S. 971, seems to me 
not more meekly recumbent, nor more frankly culture- 
less, than the so-called Polita, S. 972 : there seems also 
no French acknowledgment of its politeness, and the 
Greek family, G. 8, seem the rudest and wildest of all. 

Quite 2i field flower it is, I believe, lying always low on . 
the ground ; recumbent, but not creeping. ]^ote this dif- 
ference : no fastening roots are thrown out by the repos- 
ing stems of this Veronica ; a creeping or accurately ' ram- 
pant' plant roots itself in advancing. Conf. Nos. 5, G. 



III. VERONICA. 73 

4. Arvecsis. We have yet to note a still finer dis- 
tinction in ej^itbet. ' Agrestis ' will properly mean a 
tlower of the open ground — yet not caring whether the 
piece of earth be cultiv^ated or not, so long as it is under 
clear sky. But when a^W-culture has turned the unfruit- 
ful acres into ' arva beata,' — if then the plant thrust it- 
self between the furrows of the plough, it is properly 
called ' Arvensis.' 

I don't quite see my way to the same distinction in 
English, — perhaps I may get into the habit, as time goes 
on, of calling the Arvenses consistently furrow-flowers, 
and the Agrestes field-flowers. Furrow-veronica is a tire- 
somely long name, but must do for the present, as the 
best interpretation of its Latin character, " vulgatissima 
in cultis et arvis." D. 515. The blossom itself is exquis- 
itely delicate ; and we may be thankful, both here and 
in Denmark, for such a lovely 'vulgate.' 

5. Montana. D. 1201. The first really creeping plant 
we have had to notice. It throws out roots from the re- 
cumbent stems. Otherwise like agrestis, it has leaves 
like ground-ivy. Called a wood species in the text 
ofD. 

6. Persica. An eastern form, but now perfectly natu- 
rahzed here — D. 1982; S. 973. The flowers very large, 
and extremely beautiful, but only one springing from 
each leaf-axil. 

Leaves and stem like Montana ; and also creeping with 
new roots at intervals. 



74 PROSERPIN-A. 

7. Triphylla, (not triphjlbs, — see Flora Suecica, 22). 
Meaning trifid-leaved ; but the leaf is really divided into 
five lobes, not three — see S. 974, and G. 10. The palmate 
form of the leaf seems a mere caprice, and indicates no 
transitional form in the plant: it may be accepted as only 
a momentary compliment of mimicry to the geraniums. 
The Siberian variety, ' multifida,' C. 1G79, divides itself 
almost as the subnierged leaves of the water-ranunculus. 

The triphylla itself is widely diffused, growing alike 
on the sandy fields of Kent, and of Troy. In D. 627 is 
given an extremely delicate and minute northern type, 
the flowers springing as in Persica, one from each leaf- 
axil, and at distant intervals. 

8. Officinalis. D. 248, S. 294. Fr. ' Yeroniqne offi- 
cinale ' ; (Germ. Gebranchlicher Ehrenpreis,) our com- 
monest English and Welsh speedwell ; richest in cluster 
and frankest in roadside grow'th, whether on bank or 
rock ; but assuredly liking either a bank or a rock, and 
the top of a wall better than the shelter of one. Un- 
countable 'myriads,' I am tempted to write, but, cau- 
tiously and literally, 'hundreds' of blossoms — if one 
could count, — ranging certainly towards the thousand in 
some groups, all bright at once, make our Westmoreland 
lanes look as if they were decked for weddings, in early 
summer. In the Danish Flora it is drawn small and 
poor ; its southern type being the true one : but it is dif- 
ficult to explain the difference between the look of a 
flower which really suffers, as in this instance, by a colder 



III. VERONICA. 75 

climate, aud beconies mean and weak, as well as dwarfed ; 
and one which is braced and brightened by the cold, 
though diminished, as if under the charge and cliarm of 
an affectionate fairy, and becomes a joyfully patriotic in- 
heritor of wilder scenes and skies. Medicinal, to soul 
and body alike, this gracious and domestic flower; though 
astringent and bitter in the juice. It is the "Welsh deeply 
honoured ' Fluellen,' — See final note on the myth of 
Veronica, see § 18. 

9. Thymifolia. Thyme-leaved, G. 6. Of course the 
longest possible word — serpyllifolia — is used in S. 978. 
It is a high mountain plant, growing on the top of Crete 
as the snow retires ; and the Yeronica minor of Gerarde ; 
"the roote is small and threddie, taking hold of the wp- 
per surface of the earth, where it spreadeth." So also 
it is drawn as a creeper in F. 492, where the flower ap- 
pears to be oppressed aud concealed by the leafage. 

10. Minuta, called 'hirsuta' in S. 985: an ngly char- 
acteristic to name the lovely little thing by. The dis- 
tinct blue lines in the petals might perhaps justify ' picta' 
or ' lineata,' rather than an epithet of size ; but I suppose 
it is Gerarde's Minima, and so leave it, more safely named 
as ' minute ' than ' least.' For I think the next variety 
may dispute the leastness. 

11. Verna. D. 252. Mountains, in dry places in 
early spring. Upright, and confused in the leafage, 
which is sharp-pointed and close set, much hiding the 
blossom, but of extreme elegance, fit for a sacred fore- 



76 PROSERPIXA. 

gromid ; as any gentle student will feel, who copies this 

*)utliue from the Flora Danica, Fig. 5. 

12. Peregrina. Another extremely small variety, 
nearly pink in colour, passing in- 
to bluish lilac and white. Amer- 
ican ; but called, I do not see 
why, ' Veronique voyageuse,^ by 
the Fj'cnch, and Fremder Ehren- 
preis in Germany. Given as a 
frequent Englif^h weed in S. 927. 

13. Alpiua. Veronique des 
Alpcs. GebirgsEhrenpreis. Still 
minute ; its scarcely distinct 
flowers forming a close head 
among the leaves; round petal- 
led in D. 16, but sharp, as usual, 
in S. 980. On the Norway 
Alps in grassy places ; and in 
Scotland by the side of moun- 
tain rills; but rare. On Ben 
Nevis and Lachiny Gair (S.) 

14. Scutellata. From the 
shield-like shape of its seed-ves- 
sels. Yeronique a Ecusson ; 

^^^- ^' Schildfruchtiger Ehrenpreis. 

But the seed-vessels are more heart shape than shield. 
Marsh Speedwell. S. 988, D. 209— in the one pink, 
in the other blue ; but again in D. 1561, pink. 




Iir. VERONICA. 77 

"In flooded meadows, common." (D.) A spoiled 
and scattered form ; tbe seeds too conspicuous, but the 
flowers very delicate, hence ' Gratiola minima ' in Gesner. 
The confused ramification of the clusters worth noting, 
in relation to the e(|ualiy straggling fibres of root. 

15. Spicata. S. 982 : very prettily done, representing 
the inside of the flower as deep blue, the outside pale. 
The top of the spire, all calices, the calyx being indeed, 
through all the veronicas, an important and persistent 
member. 

The tendency to arrange itself in spikes is to be noted 
as a degradation of the veronic character; connecting it 
on one side with the snapdragons, on the other with the 
ophryds. In Veronica Ophrydea, (C. 2210,) this resem- 
blance to the contorted tribe is carried so far that " the 
corolla of the veronica becomes irregular, the tube gib- 
bous, the faux (throat) hairy, and three of the laciniae 
(lobes of petals) variously twisted." The spire of blossom, 
violet-coloured, is then close set, and exactly resembles an 
ophryd, except in being sharper at the top. The en- 
graved outline of the blossom is good, and very curious. 

16. Gentianoides. This is the most directly and cu- 
riously imitative among the — shall we call them — ' his- 
trionic' types of Veronica. It grows exactly like a clus- 
tered upright gentian ; has the same kind of leaves at its 
root, and springs with the same bright vitality among 
the retiring snows of the Bithynian Olympus. (G. 5.) 
If, however, the Caucasian flower, C. 1002, be the same. 



78 PROSERPINA. 

it has lost its perfect grace in luxuriance, growing as 
large as an asphodel, and with root-leaves half a foot long. 

The petals are much veined ; and this, of all veronicas, 
has the lower petal smallest in proportion to the three 
above, — " triplo aut quadruple) miuori." (G.) 

17. Stagnarum, Marsh - Veronica. The last four 
families we have been examining vary from the typical 
Veronicas not only in their lance-shaped clusters, but in 
their lengthened, and often every way much enl-jrged 
leaves also: and the two which we now will take in asso- 
ciation, lY and 18, carry the change in aspect farthest 
of any, being both of them true water-plants, with strong 
stems and thick leaves. The present name of my Veron- 
ica Stagnarum is however V. anao:allis, a mere insult to 
the little water primula, which one plant of the Veronica 
would make hfty of. This is a rank water-weed, having 
confused bunches of blossom and seed, like unripe cur- 
rants, dangling from the leaf-axils. So that where the 
little triphylla, (No. 7, above,) has only one blossom, 
daintily set, and well seen, this has a litter of twenty- 
five or thirty on a long stalk, of which only three or four 
are well out as flowers, and the i-est are mere knobs of 
bud or seed. The stalk is thick (half an inch round at 
the bottom), the leaves long and misshapen. " Frequens 
in fossis," D. 203. French, Mouron d'Eau, but I don't 
know the root or exact meaning of Mouron. 

An ugly Australian species, 'labiata,' C. 1660, has 
leaves two inches long, of the shape of an aloe's, and 



III. VERONICA. 79 

partly aloeine in texture, " sawed with unequal, fleshy, 
pointed teeth." 

18. Fontium. Brook - Veronica, ^rook -Zime, the 
Anglo-Saxon 'lime' from Latin limns, meaning the soft 
mud of streams. German ' Bach-bunge ' (Brook-purse ?) 
ridiculously changed by the botanists into ' Beccabunga,' 
for a Latin name ! Very beautiful in its crovv'ded green 
leaves as a stream-companion ; rich and bright more than 
watercress. See notice of it at Matlock, iri ' Modern 
Painters,' vol. v. 

19. Clara. Veronique des rochers. Saxatilis, I sup- 
pose, in Sowerby, but am not sure of having identified 
that with my own favourite, for which I therefore keep 
the name ' Clara,' (see above, § 9) ; and the other rock 
variety, if indeed another, must be remembered, together 
with it. 

20. Glauca. G. T. And this, at all events, with the 
Clara, is to be remembered as closing the series of twenty 
families, acknowledged by Proserpina. It is a beautiful 
low-growing ivy-leaved type, with flowers of subdued 
lilac blue. On Mount Hymettus : no other locality 
given in the Flora GrsEca. 

15. I am sorry, and shall always be so, when the vari- 
eties of any flower which I have to commend to the stu- 
dent's memory, exceed ten or twelve in number ; but I 
am content to gratify liis pride with lengthier task, if 
indeed he will resign himself to the imperative close of 
the more inclusive catalogue, and be content to know 



80 PROSERPINA. 

the twelve, oi' sixteen, or twenty, acknowledged families, 
thoroughly; and only in their illustration to think of 
rarer forms. The object of 'Proserpina' is to make him 
happily cognizant of the common aspect of Greek and 
English flowers ; under the term ' English,' comprehend- 
ing the Saxon, Celtic, Is^orman, and Danish Floras. Of 
the evergreen shrub alluded to in § 11 above, the Ve- 
ronica Decussata of the Pacific, which is " a bushy ever- 
green, with beautifidlv set cross-leaves, and white blos- 
soms scented like olea fragrans," I should like him only 
to read with much surprise, and some incredulity, in 
Pinkerton's or other entertaining ti'avellers' voyages. 

16. And of the families given, he is to note for the 
common simple characteristic, that they are quatrefoils 
referred to a more or less elevated position on a central 
stem, and having, in that relation, the lowermost petal 
diminished, contrary to the almost universal habit of 
other flowers to develope in such a position the lower 
petal chiefly, that it may have its full share of light. 
You will find nothing but blunder and embarrassment 
result from any endeavour to enter into further particu- 
lars, such as " the relation of the dissepiment with respect 
to the valves of the capsule," etc., etc., since "in the 
various species of Veronica almost every kind of dehis- 
cence may be observed " (C. under V. perfoliata, 1936, 
an Australian species). Sibthorpe gives the entire defi- 
nition of Veronica with only one epithet added to mine, 
" Corolla quadrifida, rofata, lacinia infima angustiore," 



III. VERONICA. 81 

but I do not know what ' rotata -' here means, as there is 
no appearance of revolved action in the petals, so far as 
I can see. 

IT. Of the mythic or poetic significance of the ver- 
onica, there is less to be said than of its natural beauty. 
I have not been able to discover with what feeling, or at 
what time, its sacred name was originally given ; and the 
legend of S. Veronica herself is, in the substance of it, 
irrational, and therefoi-e incredible. The meaning of 
the term ' rational,' as applied to a legend or miracle, is, 
that there has been an intelligible need for the permis- 
sion of the miracle at the time when it is recorded ; and 
that the nature and manner of the act itself should be 
comprehensible in the scope. There was thus quite sim- 
ple need for Christ to feed the multitudes, and to appear 
to S. Paul ; but no need, so far as human intelligence 
can reach, for the reflection of His features upon a piece 
of linen which could be seen by not one in a million of 
the disciples to whom He might more easily, at any time, 
manifest Himself personally and perfectly. Nor, I be- 
lieve, has the story of S. Veronica ever been asserted to 
be other than symbolic by the sincere teachers of the 
Church ; and, even so far as in that merely explanatory 
function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is 
not easy to understand how the pensive fable was asso- 
ciated with a flower so familiar, so bright, and so popu- 
larly of good omen, as the Speedwell. 

18. Yet, the fact being actually so, and this consecra- 



83 PROSEKPIN-A. 

tion of the veronica being certainly far more ancient and 
earnest than the faintly romantic and extremely absurd 
legend of the forget-me-not; the speedwell has assuredly 
the higher claim to be given and accepted as a token of 
pure and faithful love, and to be trusted as a sweet sign 
that the innocence of affection is indeed more frequent, 
and the appointed destiny of its faith more fortunate, 
than our inattentive hearts have hitherto discerned. 

19. And this the more, because the recognized virtues 
and uses of the plant are real and manifold ; and the 
ideas of a peculiar honourableness and worth of life con- 
nected with it by the German popular name ' Honour- 
prize' ; w^hile to the heart of the British race, the same 
thought is brought home by Shakespeare's adoption of 
the flower's Welsh name, for the faithfullest common 
soldier of his ideal king. As a lover's pledge, therefore, 
it does not merely mean memory ;— for, indeed, why 
should love be thought of as such at all, if it need to 
promise not to forget ? — but the blossom is significant 
also of the lover's best virtues, patience in suffering, 
purity in thought, gaiety in courage, and serenity in 
truth : and therefore I make it, worthily, the clasping 
and central flower of the Cytherides. 



CHAPTER W. 



GItJLIETTA. 



1. Supposing that, in early life, one Lad the power of 
living to one's fancy, — and whj should we not, if tlie 
said fancj were restrained by the knowledge of the two 
great laws concerning onr nature, that happiness is in- 
creased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but 
of the heart ; and days lengthened, not by the crowding 
of emotions, but the economy of them? — if thns taught, 
we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and estate in 
our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in 
pleasure would be better rewarded than that of making 
our gardens gay only with common flowers ; and leaving 
those which needed care for their transplanted life to be 
found in their native places when we travelled. So long 
as I had crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the sum- 
mer, and hollyhocks and pinks in the autumn, I used to 
be myself independent of farther horticulture, — and it 
is only now that I am old, and since pleasant travelling 
has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have 
the white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to 
walk through the fragrance of the meadows of Clarens ; 
and pleased to see the milkwort blue on my scythe-mown 



84 PROSEIIPINA. 

banks, since I cannot gather it any more on tlie rocks of 
the Yosges, or in the divine glens of Jura. 

2. Among the losses, all the more fatal in being nn- 
felt, brought upon us by the fury and vulgarity of 
modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the loss of 
the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day, 
— whether indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and 
remorse in the public mind, as to the perfect jubilee of 
railroad journe}', or merely a piece of the common daily 
flattery on which the power of the British press first de- 
pends, I cannot judge ; — but, for one or other of sucli 
motives, I saw lately in some illustrated paper, a pictorial 
comparison of old-fashioned and modern travel, represent- 
ing, as the type of things passed away, the outside passen- 
gers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent dis- 
tress from the swirl of a winter snowstorm ; and for 
type of the present Elysian dispensation, the inside of a 
lirst-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful young lady in 
the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing, 
Daily news in hand, with a young oflScer — her fortunate 
vis-a-vis — on the subject of our military successes in 
Afghanistan and Zululand.* 

3. I will not, in presenting — it must not be called the 
other side, but the supplementary, and wilfully omitted, 
facts, of this ideal, — oppose, as I fairly might, the dis- 

* See letter on the last results of our African campaigns, in the 
Moiining Post of April 14th, of this year. 



IV. GIULIETTA, 85 

comforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the 
chariot-and-foiir, with outriders and courier, of ancient 
noblesse. I will comj^are only the actual facts, in the 
former and in latter years, of my own journey from Paris 
to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself, 
at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused 
crowd with which I am presently to contend for a seat, 
in the dim light and cigar-stench of the great station of 
the Lyons line. Making slow way through the hostili- 
ties of the platform, in partly real, partly weak polite- 
ness, as may be, I find the corner seats of course already 
full of prohibitory cloaks and umbrellas; but manage to 
get a middle back one ; the net overhead is already sur- 
charged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I 
squeeze my desk as well as I can between my legs, and 
arrange what w^raps I have about my knees and shoulders. 
Follow a conple of hours of simple patience, with noth- 
ing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the 
line under the wheels, tlie blinking and dripping of the 
oil lantern, and the more or less ungainly wretchedness, 
and variously sullen compromises and encroachments of 
posture, among the five other passengers preparing them- 
selves for sleep : the last arrangement for the night be- 
ing to shut up both windows, in order to effect, with our 
six breaths, a salutary modification of the night air. 

4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the 
turn-tables wakes me up as I am beginning to doze, at 
Fontainebleau, and again at Sens ; and the trilling and 



86 PROSERPINA. 

thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in 
ray ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shiver 
ing, suspicious sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely 
fretful shrugs and fidgets, carries me as far as Tonnerre, 
wb.ere the 'quinze minutes d'arret' revolutionize every- 
thing ; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and 
perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear 
morning ; and so generally keep awake past Mont Bard, 
remembering the happy walks one used to have on the 
terrace under Butfon's tower, and thence watching, if 
perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film 
of moonlight may show the far undulating masses of the 
hills of Citeaux. But most likely one knows the place 
wdiere the great old view used to be only by the sensible 
quickening of the pace as the train turns down the in- 
cline, and crashes through the trenched cliffs into the con- 
fusion and high clattering vault of the station at Dijon. 

5. And as my journey is almost always in the spring- 
time, the twisted spire of the cathedral usually shows it- 
self against the first grey of dawn, as we run out again 
southwards : and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall 
more complacently asleep, — and the sun is really up by 
the time one has to change carriages, and get morning 
coffee at Macon. And from Amberieux, through the 
Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and 
thankful, not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc 
again, as in having got through the nasty and gloomy 
night journey ; and then the sight of the Rhone and 



IV. GIULIETTA. ^ 




1, p^W^ 



tlie Saleve seems only like a dream, ptieagf®jy to end i^;>^ 

nothino-ness : till, covered with dust, and fe«M2?A3 if one * 

never should be fit for anything any more, on^jj^a^ej-a *~a* 

down the hill to the Hotel des JBergues, and se^^t^jjg ^*'' 

dirtied Khone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke 

of a new factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles 

of Chamouni. 

6. That is the journey as it is now, — and as, for me, it 
must be ; except on foot, since there is now no other way 
of making it. But this was the way we used to manage 
it in old days : — 

Yei'y early in Continental transits we had found out 
that the family travelling carriage, taking much time 
and ingenuity to load, needing at the least three, usually 
four — horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only jolted 
and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every 
way to more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehi- 
cles ; getting itself jammed in archways, wrenched with 
damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of justifiable 
reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew 
better, my father and mother always had their own old- 
fashioned light two-horse carriage to themselves, and I 
had one made with any quantity of front and side 
pockets for books and picked up stones ; and hung very 
low, with a fixed side-step, which I could get off or on 
with the horses at the trot ; and at any rise or fall of the 
road, relieve them, and get my own walk, without troub- 
ling the driver to think of me. 



88 PROSliKPIKA. 

7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, 
when the Seine glittered gailj at Charenton, and the 
arbres de Judee were mere pyramids of purple bloom 
round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk 
among the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got 
early into Sens, for new lessons in its cathedral aisles, 
and the first saunter among the budding vines of the 
coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, 
for the ' Seven Lamps,' 'in the old inn at Sens, which 
Dickens has described in his wholly matchless way in the 
last chapter of ' Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The next day 
brought ns to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and 
we always spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Mon- 
day, the drive of drives, through the village of Genlis, 
the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the vine- 
surrounded town of Dole ; whence, behold at last the 
limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, beyond the 
woody plain, and above them the ' Derniers Rochers ' 
and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew. 
Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the 
first milkwort for that year ; and on Tuesday, at St. 
Laurent, the wild lily of the valley ; and on Wednesday, 
at Morez, gentians. 

And on Thursday, the eighth or ninth day from Paris, 
days all spent patiently and well, one saw from the 
gained height of Jura, the great Alps unfold themselves 
in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud. 

8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefuUest 



IV. GIULIETTA. 89 

years of sncli travelling, I bad no tbong-lit of ever taking 
up botany as a study ; feeling well tbat even geology, 
whicb was antecedent to painting witb me, could not be 
followed out in connection witb art but under strict 
limits, and witb sore shortcomings. It bas only been 
tbe later discovery of tbe uselessness of old scientific 
botany, and tbe abominableness of new, as an element 
of education for youtb ; — and my certainty tbat a true 
knowledge of tbeir native Flora was meant by Heaven 
to be one of tbe first beart-possessions of every bappy 
boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, tbat bave compelled 
me to gatber into system my fading memories, and wan- 
dering tbougbts.'^ And of course in tbe diaries written 
at places of wbicb I now want cbiefly tbe details of tbe 
Flora, I find none ; and in tins instance of tbe milkwort, 
wbose name I was first told by tbe Cbaraouni guide, 
Josepb Couttet, tben walking witb me on tbe unperilous 
turf of tbe first rise of tbe Yosges, west of Strasburg, 
and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint tbat, 
being tben tbirty-seven 3^ears old, and not yet able to 
draw tbe great plain and distant spire, it was of no use 
trying in tbe poor i-emainder of life to do auytbing seri- 
ous, — tben, and there, I say, for tbe first time examining 
the strange little flower, and always associating it, since, 
witb the limestone crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I 

* I deliberately, not garrulously, allow more autobiograpLy in 
' Proserpina ' tbau is becoming, because I know not how far I may be 

permitted to carry on that which was begun in ' Fors.' 



90 PROSERPINA. 

don't find a single note of its preferences or antipathies 
in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it 
chooses, or the height it ventures, or the faraiharities to 
whicli it condescends, on the Alps or Apennines. 

9, But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at 
Brant wood, that it is capricious and fastidious beyond 
any other little blossom I know of. In laying out the 
rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to 
remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of 
stone, among which nearly every other wild flower that 
likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to root itself. But 
at the top of all, one terrace was brought to mathemati- 
cally true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed 
with delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept 
duly trim by the scythe. And only on this terrace does 
the Giulietta choose to show herself, — and even there, 
not in any consistent places, but gleaming out here in 
one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected 
sky through cloud ; and entirely refusing to allow either 
batdc or terrace to be mown the least trim during her 
time of disport there. So spared and indulged, there 
are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds ; 
no more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by 
watch through day and night, than her recumbent clus- 
ters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing through the 
grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue. 

10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varie- 
ties of the Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and 



IV. GIULIETTA. 91 

presumably characteristic forms belong to the Cape ; and 
only since Mr. Fronde came back from his African ex- 
])lorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the 
brilliancy and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers. 
If I could but write down the substance of what he has 
told me, in the course of a chat or two, which have been 
among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, 
(prolonged as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it 
would be a better summary of what should be generally 
known in the natural history of southern plants than I 
could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany. 
In the meantime, everything being again thrown out of 
gear by the aforesaid illness, I must let this piece of 
' Proserpina ' break off, as most of my work does — and as 
perhaps all of it may soon do — leaving only suggestion 
for the happier research of the students who trust me 
thus far. 

11. Some essential points respecting the flower I shall 
note, however, before ending. There is one large and 
frequent species of it of which the flowers are delicately 
yellow, touched with tawny red, forming one of the chief 
elements of wild foreground vegetation in the healthy 
districts of hard Alpine limestone.* This is, I believe, 

* In present Botany, Polygala Chamsebuxus ; C. 316 : or, in Eng- 
lish, Much Milk Ground-box. It is not, as matters usually go, a name 
to be ill thought of, as it really contains three ideas ; and the plant 
does, without doubt, somewhat resemble box, and grows on the 
ground; — far more fitly called 'ground -box' than the Veronica 



92 PUOSERPIXA. 

the only European type of the large Cape varieties, iu all 
of which, judging from such plates as have been accessible 
to me, the crests or fringes of the lower petal are less 
conspicuous than in the smaller species ; and the flower 
almost takes the aspect of a broom-blossom or pease- 
blossom. In the smaller European varieties, the white 
fringes of the lower petal are the most important and 
characteristic part of the flower, and they are, among 
European wild flowers, absolutely without any likeness 
of associated structure. The fringes or crests which, 
towards the origin of petals, so often give a frosted or 
gemmed appearance to the centres of flowers, are here 
thrown to the extremity of the petal, and suggest an al- 
most coralline structure of blossom, which in no other 
instance whate;ver has been imitated, still less carried out 
into its conceivable varieties of form. How many such 
varieties might have been i^roduced if these fringes of the 
Giulietta, or those already alluded to of Lucia nivea, had 
been repeated and enlarged ; as the type, once adopted 
for complex bloom in the thistle-head, is multiplied in 
the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawk weed, 
and aster ! We might have had flowers edged with lace 
finer than was ever woven by mortal fingers, or tasselled 

' ground-oak. ' I want to find a pretty name for it in connection with 
Savoy oi' Daupliine, where it indicates, as above stated, the healthy 
districts of hard limestone. I do not remember it as ever occurring 
among the dark and moist shales of the inner mountain ranges, which 
at once confine and pollute the air. 



IV. GIULIETTA. 93 

and braided with fretwork of silver, never tarnished — or 
lioarfrost that grew brighter in the sun. But it was not 
to be, and after a few hints of what might be done in 
this kind, the Fate, or Folly, or, on recent theories^ the 
extreme fitness — and consequent survival, of the Thistles 
and Dandelions, entirely drives the fringed Lncias and 
blue-flnshing milkworts out of common human neigh- 
bourhood, to live recluse lives with the memories of the 
abbots of Cluny, and pastors of Piedmont. 

12. I have called the Ginlietta " hlxie-Jlushing '' because 
it is one of the group of exquisite flowers which at the 
time of their own blossoming, breathe their colour into 
the surrounding leaves and supporting stem. Yery not- 
ably the Grape hyacinth and Jura hyacinth, and some 
of the Yestals, empurpling all their green leaves even 
to the ground : a quite distinct nature in the flower, (»b- 
serve, this possession of a power to kindle the leaf and 
stem with its own passion, from that of the heaths, roses, 
or lilies, where the determined bracts or calices assert 
themselves in opposition to the blossom, as little pine- 
leaves, or mosses, or brown paper packages, and the like. 

13. The Giulietta, however, is again entirely separate 
from the other leaf-flushing blossoms, in that, after the 
two green leaves next the flower have glowed with its 
blue, while it lived, they do not fade or waste with it, but 
retLirn to their own former green simplicity, and close 
over-it to protect the seed. I only know this to he the 
case with the Giulietta Regina ; but suppose it to be 



94 PROSERPINA. 

(with variety of course in the colours) a condition in 
other species, — though of course nothing is ever said of 
it in the botanical accounts of them. I gather, hovs^ever, 
from Curtis's careful drawings that the j)revailing colour 
of the Cape species is purple, thus justifying still further 
my placing them among the Cytherides ; and I am con- 
tent to take the descriptive epithets at present given 
them, for the following five of this southern group, hop- 
ing that they may be explained for me afterwards by 
helpful friends. 

14. Bractealata, C. 345. 
Oppositifolia, C. 4^2. 
Speciosa, C. 1790. 

These three all purple, and scarcely distinguishable from 
sweet pease-blossom, only smaller. 

Stipulacea, C. 1715. Small, and very beautiful, lilac 
and purple, with a leaf and mode of growth like rose- 
mary. The " Foxtail " milkwort, whose name I don't ac- 
cept, C. 1006, is intermediate between this and the next 
species. 

15. Mixta, C. 1714. I don't see what mingling is 
meant, except that it is just like Erica tetralix in the 
leaf, only, apparently, having little four-petalled pinks 
for blossoms. This appearance is thus botanically ex- 
plained. I do not myself understand the description, 
but copy it, thinking it may be of use to somebody. 
*• The apex of the carina is expanded into a two-lobed. 
plain petal, the lobes of which are emarginate. This ap- 



IV. GIULIETTA. 95 

pendix is of a bright rose colour, and forms the principal 
part of the flower." The describer relaxes, or relapses, 
into common language so far as to add that ' this appen- 
dix' "dispersed among the green foliage in every part 
of the shrub, gives it a pretty lively appearance." 

Perhaps this may also be worth extracting. 

" Carina, deeply channeled, of a saturated purple with- 
in, sides folded together, so as to include and firmly 
embrace the style and stamens, which, when arrived at 
maturity, upon being moved, escape elastically from their 
confinement, and strike against the two erect petals or 
als3 — by which the pollen is dispersed. 

" Stem shrubby, with long flexile branches." (Length 
or height not told. I imagine like an ordinary heath's.) 

The term ' carina,' occurring twice in the above descrip- 
tion, is peculiar to the structure of the pease and milk- 
worts ; we will examine it afterwards. The European 
varieties of the milkwort, except the chamsebuxus, are 
all minute, — and, their ordinary epithets being at least 
inoffensive, I give them for reference till we find prettier 
ones ; altering only the Calcarea, because we could not 
have a ' Chalk Juliet,' and two varieties of the Regina, 
changed for reason good — her name, according to the 
last modern refinements of grace and ease in pronuncia- 
tion, being Eu-vularis, var. genuina ! My readers may 
more happily remember her and her sister as follows : — 



?6 PllOSERPIXA. 

16. (i.) Ginlietta Eegina. Pure blue. The same in 
colour, form, and size, throughout Europe. 

(n.) Ginlietta Soror-Regiiife. Pale, reddish-blue 
or white in the flower, and smaller in the 
leaf, otherwise like the Eegina. 

(in.) Ginlietta Depressa. The smallest of those I 
can find drawings of. Flowers, blue ; lilac 
in the fringe, and no bigger than pins' 
heads ; the leaves quite gem-like in minute- 
ness and order. 

(iv.) Gialietta Cisterciana. Its present name, ' Cal- 
carea,' is meant, in botanic Latin, to express 
its growth on limestone or chalk moun- 
tains. But we might as well call the South 
Down sheep. Calcareous mutton. My ejji- 
thet will rightly associate it with the Bur- 
gundian hills round Cluny and Citeaux. 
Its ground leaves are much larger than 
those of the Depressa ; the flower a little 
larger, but very pale. 

(y.) Giulietta Austriaca. Pink, and very lovely, 
with bold cluster of ground leaves, but it- 
self minute — almost dwarf. Called 'small 
bitter milkwort ' by S. How far distinct 
from the next following one, Norwegian, 
is not told. 



IV. GIULIETTA. 97 

The above five kinds are given by Sow- 

erbj as British, but I have never found the 

Austriaca myself, 
(vi.) Giulietta Amara. Norwegian. Yery quaint 

in blossom outline, like a little blue rabbit 

with long ears. D. 1169. 
IT. Nobody tells me why cither this last or No. 5 have 
been called bitter ; and Gerarde's five kinds are distin- 
guished only by colour — blue, red, white, purple, and 
" the dark, of an OV' crworn ill-favoured coloui", which 
maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find 
no account of this ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white 
is my Soror Eeginse ; the red must be the Austriaca ; but 
the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn 
indeed. All of them must have been more common in 
Gerarde's time than now, for he goes on to say " Milk- 
woort is called Amhamalis Jlos. so called because it doth 
sp3cially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or Eoga- 
tion-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in 
the countries to walk the procession do make themselves 
garlands and nosegaies, in Englisb we may call it Crosse 
flower. Gang flower, Rogation flower, and Milk-woort." 

18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the 
Cytherides, I too hastily concluded that the ascription to 
this plant of helpfulness to nursing mothers was ' more 
than ordinarily false ' ; thinking that its rarity could 
never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, 
or in any degree true, the flower has the best light of all 



98 PROSERPINA. 

to be classed with the Cytberides, and we might have as 
much of it for beauty and for service as we clioosc, if we 
only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens 
with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish 
our winter gluttonies with dying and useless ones. 

19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, hav- 
ing never had the hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort 
cluster— nor the chance of watching one in seed : — The 
pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of 
April, and leaves no sign of itself — that / ever found. 
The botanists tell me that its fruit " dehisces loculicidally," 
which I suppose is botanic for " splits like boxes," (but 
boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used to make and 
handle them before railways). Out of the split boxes 
fall seeds — too few ; and, as aforesaid, the plant never 
seems to grow again in the same spot, I should thank- 
fully receive any notes from friends happy enough to 
live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity. 

20. Meanw^hile, the Thistle, and the Settle, and the 
Dock, and the Dandelion are cared for in their genera- 
tions by the finest arts of — Providence, shall we say ? or 
of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Pro- 
vidence ? May I ask the reader to look back to the 
seventh chapter of the first volume, for it contains sug- 
gestions of thoughts which came to me at a time of very 
earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too 
shortly, under the press of reading they involved, but 
intelligible enough if they are read as slowly as they were 



IV. GIULIETTA. 99 

written, and especially note the paragraph of summary of 
p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and 
^i^ judge j watching and i-ewarding the conditions which 
induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men : 
comparing with it carefully the close of the fourth chap- 
ter, p. 85,* which contains, for the now recklessly mul- 
tiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential 
t3 their skill, and inexorable upon their labour. 

21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with 
more than his usual care in the frontispiece to this num- 
ber of ' Proserpina,' was one of many executed during 
the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and 
later French), which founded their minor ornamentation 
on the serration of the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that 
of the Acanthus, but with a consequent, and often mor- 
bid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon jagged or 
knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is con- 
nected in a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier 
forms of Catholic asceticism. f 

* Whicli, with tlie following page, is the summary of many chap- 
ters of ' Modern Painters : ' and of the aims kept in view throughout 
' Munera Pulveris.' The three kinds of Desert specified — of Eced, 
Sand, and Rock— should be kept in mind as exhaustively including 
the states of the earth neglected by man. For instance of a Reed 
desert, produced merely by his neglect, see Sir Samuel Baker's ac- 
count of the choking up of the bed of the White Nile. Of the sand 
desert. Sir F. Palgrave's journey from the Djowf to Hayel, vol. i., p. 92. 

f This subject is first entered on in the ' Seven Lamps,' and carried 
forward in the final chapters of 'Modem Painters,' to the point where 



100 PROSERPINA. 

22. But also, in beginning ' Proserpina,' I intended to 
give many illustrations of the light and shade of fore- 
ground leaves belonging to the nobler groups of thistles, 
because I thought they had been neglected by ordinary 
botanical draughtsmen ; not knowing at that time either 
the original drawings at Oxford for the ' Flora Graeca,' 
or the nobly engraved plates executed in the close of the 
last century for the ' Flora Danica ' and ' Flora Londin- 
ensis.' The latter is in the most difficult portraiture of 
the larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two ; 
and had I seen the miracles of skill, patience, and faith- 
ful study w^iich are collected in the first and second 
volumes, published in 1Y77 and 1798, I believe my own 
work Avould never have been undertaken.* Such as it 
is, however, I may still, health being granted me, per- 
severe in it ; for my own leaf and branch studies express 
conditions of shade w^hich even these most exquisite 
botanical plates ignore ; and exemplify uses of the pen 
and pencil which cannot be learned from the inimitable 
fineness of line engraving. The frontispiece to this num- 
ber, for instance, (a seeding head of the commonest field- 
thistle of our London suburbs,) copied with a steel pen on 
smooth grey paper, and the drawing softly touched with 

I hope to take it up for conclusion, in the sections of ' Our Fathers 
have told us ' devoted to the historj^ of the fourteenth centurj'. 

* See in the first volume, the plates of Sonchus Arvensis and Tus- 
silago Petasites ; in the second, Carduus tomcntosus and Picris 
Echioides. 



IV. GIULIETTA. 101 

white on the nearer thorns, may well surpass the effect of 
the plate. 

23. In the following number of ' Proserpina ' I have 
been tempted to follow, with more minute notice than 
usual, the ' conditions of adversity ' which, as they fret the 
thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty 
of the great domestic group of the Yestals into confused 
likenesses of the Dragonweed and Nettle : but I feel 
every hour more and more the necessity of separating 
the treatment of subjects in 'Proserpina' from the mi- 
croscopic curiosities of recent botanic illustration, nor 
shall this work close, if my strength hold, without fulfil- 
ling in some sort, the effort begun long ago in ' Modern 
Painters,' to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming 
trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the 
Swiss precipice with gentleness, and colour with softest 
azure the rich horizons of England and Italy. 



CHAPTER Y. 



BBUNELLA. 



1. It ought to have been added to the statements of 
general law in irregular flowers, in Chapter I. of this 
volume, § 6, that if the petals, while brought into rela- 
tions of inequality, still retain their perfect petal form, — 
and whether broad or narrow, extended or reduced, re- 
main clearly leaves, as in the pansy, pea, or azalea, and 
assume no grotesque or obscure outline, — the flower, 
though injured, is not to be thought of as corrupted or 
misled. But if any of the petals lose their definite char- 
acter as such, and become swollen, solidified, stiffened, 
or strained into any other form or function than that of 
petals, the flower is to be looked upon as affected by 
some kind qf constant evil influence ; and, so far as we 
conceive of any spiritual power being concerned in the 
protection or affliction of tlie inferior orders of creatures, 
it will be felt to bear the aspect of possession by, or pol- 
lution by, a more or less degraded Spirit.* 

2. I have already enough spoken of the special mani- 



* For the sense in which this woi-d is used throughout my writings, 
see the definition of it in the 52nd paragraph of the ' Queen of the 
Air,' comparing with respect to its office in plants, §§ 59-60, 



V. BRUNELLA. 103 

festation of this character in the orders Contorta and 
Satyrium, vol. i., p. 91, and the reader will find the 
])arallel aspects of the Draconidae dwelt upon at length 
in the 86th and 87th paragraphs of the ' Queen of the 
Air,' where also their relation to the labiate group is 
touched upon. But I am far moi-e embarrassed by the 
symbolism of that group which I called 'Yestales,' from 
their especially domestic character and their serviceable 
purity ; but whicli may be, with more convenience per- 
haps, simply recognizable as ' Menthae.- 

3. These are, to our northern countries, what the spice- 
bearing trees are in the tropics ; — our thyme, lavender, 
luinr, marjoram, and their like, separating themselves 
not less in the health giving or strengthening character 
of their scent from the flowers more or less enervating in 
perfume, as the rose, orange, and violet, — than in their 
humble colours and forms from the grace and splendour 
of those higher tribes ; thus allowing themselves to be 
summed under the general word ' balm' more truly than 
the balsams from which the word is derived. Giving 
the most pure and healing powers to the air around 
them ; with a comfort of warmth also, being mostly in 
dry places, and forming sweet carpets and close turf; 
but only to be rightly enjoyed in the open air, or indoors 
when dried ; not tempting any one to luxury, nor ex- 
pressive of any kind of exaltation. Brides do not deck 
themselves with thyme, nor do we wreathe triumphal 
arches with mint. 



104 PKOSERPINA. 

4. It is most notable, also, farther, that none of these 
flowers have any extreme beauty in colour. The blue 
sage is the only one of vivid hue at all ; and we never 
think of it as for a moment comparable to the violet or 
bluebell : thyme is unnoticed beside heath, and many of 
the other purple varieties of the group are almost dark 
and sad coloured among the flowers of summer; while, 
so far from gaining beauty on closer looking, there is 
scarcely a blossom of them which is not more or less 
grotesque, even to ugliness, in outline; and so hooded or 
lappeted as to look at first like some imperfect form of 
snapdragon : for the most part spotted also, wrinkled as 
if by old age or decay, cleft or torn, as if by violence, 
and springing out of calices which, in their clustering 
spines, embody the general roughness of the plant. 

5. I take at once for example, lest the reader should 
think me unkind or intemperate in my description, a 
flower very dear and precious to me ; and at this lime 
my chief comfort in field walks. For, now, the reign 
of all the sweet reginas of the spring is over — the reign 
of the Silvia and anemone, of viola and veronica; and at 
last, and this year abdicated under tyrannous storm,* the 
reign of the rose. And the last foxglove-bells are nearly 
fallen ; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are 
coming up the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white 
aster, and the black knapweeds ; and there is only one 

* Written in 1880. 



V. BRDKELLA. 105 

flower left to love among the grass, — the soft, warm- 
seented Brunelle. 

6. /^rimell, or Brunell — Gerarde calls it, and Brunella, 
rightly and authoritatively, Tournefort ; Prunella, care- 
lessly, LinniEus, and idly following him, the moderns, 
casting out all the meaning and help of its name — of 
which presently. Selfe-heale, Gerarde and Gray call it, 
in English — meaning that who has this plant needs no 
physician. 

7. As I look at it, close beside me, it seems as if it 
would reprove me for what I have just said of the pov- 
erty of colour in its tribe ; for the most glowing of vio- 
lets could not be lovelier than each fine purple gleam of 
its hooded blossoms. But their flush is broken and op- 
pressed by the dark calicos out of which they spring, and 
their utmost power in the field is only of a saddened 
amethystine lustre, subdued with furry brown. And 
what is worst in the victory of the darker colour is the 
disorder of the scattered blossoms ; — of all flowers I know, 
this is the strangest, in the way that here and there, only 
in their cluster, its bells rise or remain, and it always 
looks as if half of them had been shaken off, and the top 
of the cluster broken short away altogether. 

8. We must never lose hold of the principle that 
every flower is meant to be seen by human creatures 
with human eyes, as by spiders with spider eyes. But 
as the painter may sometimes play the spider, and weave 
a mesh to entrap the heart, so the beholder may play the 



1D6 PROSERPINA. 

spider, when there are meshes to be disentangled that 
have entrapped his mind. I take my lens, therefore — to 
the little wonder of a brown wasps' nest with blue-winged 
wasps in it, — and perceive therewith the following par- 
ticulars. 

9. First, that the blue of the petals is indeed pure and 
lovely, and a little crystalline in texture ; but that the 
form and setting of them is grotesque beyond all won- 
der ; the two uppermost joined being like an old fash- 
ioned and enormous hood or bonnet, and the lower one 
projecting far out in the shape of a cup or cauldron, 
torn deep at the edges into a kind of fringe. 

Looking more closely still, I perceive there is a cluster 
of stiff white hairs, almost bristles, on the top of the 
hood ; for no imaginable purpose of use or decoration — 
any more than a hearth-brush put for a helmet-crest, — 
and that, as we put the flower full in front, the lower 
petal begins to look like some threatening viperine or 
shark-like jaw, edged with ghastly teeth, — and yet more, 
that the hollow within begins to suggest a resemblance 
to an open throat in which there are two projections 
where the lower petal joins the latei'al ones, almost ex- 
actly like swollen glands. 

I believe it was this resemblance, inevitable to any 
careful and close observer, which first suggested the use 
of the plant in throat diseases to physicians ; guided, as 
in those first days of pharmacy, chiefly by imagination. 
Then the German name for one of the most fatal of 



V. BRUNELLA, 107 

throat affections, Braune, extended itself into the first 
name of the plant, Brunelle. 

10. The truth of all popular traditions as to the heal- 
ing power of herbs will be tried impartially as soon as 
men again desire to lead healthy lives ; but I shall not in 
' Proserpina ' retain any of the names of their gathered 
and dead or distilled substance, but name them always 
from the characters of their life. I retain, however, for 
this plant its name Brunelia, Fr, Brunelle, because wc 
may ourselves understand it as a derivation from Brune ; 
and I l)ring it here before the reader's attention as giving 
him a perfectly instructive general type of the kind of 
degradation which takes place in the forms of flowers 
under more or less malefic influence, causing distortion 
and disguise of their floral structure. Thus it is not the 
normal character of a flower petal to have a cluster of 
bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at 
the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish's jaw, nor to be 
swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in 
an animal's throat. A really uncorrupted flower suggests 
none but delightful images, and is like nothing but itself. 

11. I find that in the year 1719, Tournefort defined, 
with exactitude which has rendered the definition author- 
itative for all time, the tribe to which this Brownie 
flower belongs, constituting them his fourth class, and 
describing them in terms even more depreciatingly im- 
aginative than any I have ventured to use myself. I 
translate the passage [yoI. i., p. 177) : — 



108 PROSERPINA. 

12. " The name of Labiate flower is given to a single- 
petaled flower which, beneath, is attenuated into a tube, 
and above is expanded into a lip, which is either single 
or double. It is proper to a labiate flower, — first, that 
it has a one-leaved caljx (ut calycem habeat unifolium), 
for the most part tubulated, or reminding one of a paper 
hood (cucullum papyraeeum) ; and, secondly, that its 
pistil ripens into a fruit consisting of four seeds, which 
ripen in the calyx itself, as if in their ovru seed-vessel, 
by which a labiate flower is distinguished from a per- 
sonate one, whose pistil becomes a capsule far divided 
from the calyx (a calyce longe divisam). And a labiate 
flower differs from rotate, or bell-shaped flowers, which 
have four seeds, in that the lips of a labiate flower have 
a gape like the face of a goblin, or ludicrous mask, emu- 
lous of animal form." 

13. This class is then divided into four sections. 

In the first, the upper lip is helmeted, or hooked — 
"galeatum est, vel falcatum." 

In the second, the upper lip is excavated like a spoon 
— " cochlearis instar est excavatum." 

In the third the upper lip is erect. 

And in the fourth there is no upper lip at all. 

The reader will, I hope, forgive me for at once reject- 
ing a classification of lipped plants into three classes that 
have lips, and one that has none, and in which the lips 
of those that have got any, are like helmets and spoons. 

Linnaeus, in 1758, grouped the family into two divi- 



V. BRUISTELLA. 109 

sioEs, bv the form of the calyx, (five-fold or two-fold), 
and then went into the wildest confusion in distinction 
of species, — sometimes by the form of corolla, sometimes 
by that of calyx, sometimes by that of the filaments, 
sometimes by that of the stigma, and sometimes by that 
of the seed. As, for instance, thyme is to be identified 
by the calyx having liairs in its throat, dead nettle by 
having bristles in its mouth, lion's tail by having bones 
in its anthers (antherge punctis osseis adspersae), and 
teucrium by having its upper lip cut in two ! 

14. St. Hilaire, in 1805, divides again into four sec- 
tions, but as three of these depend on form of corolla, 
and the fourth on abortion of stamens, the reader may 
conclude practically, that logical division of the family 
is impossible, and that all he can do, or that there is the 
smallest occasion for his doing, is first to understand the 
typical structure thoroughly, and then to know a certain 
number of forms accurately, grouping the others round 
them at convenient distances ; and, finally, to attach to 
their known forms such simple names as may be utter- 
able by children, and memorable by old people, with 
more ease and benefit than the ' Galeopsis Eu-te-trahit,' 
' Lamium Galeobdalon,' or ' Scutellaria Galericulata,' and 
*tlie like, of modern botany. But to do this rightly, I 
must review and amplify some of my former classifica- 
tion, which it will be advisable to do in a separate 
chapter. 



CHAPTER YI. 



MONACHA. 



1. It is not a little vexing to me, in looking over the 
very little I have got done of mv planned iSystcma 
Proserpinee, to discover a grave mistake in the specifica- 
tions of Veronica. It is Veronica chamaedrys, not offi- 
cinalis, which is our proper English Speedwell, and 
Welsh Fluellen ; and all the eighth paragraph, p. 74, 
properly applies to that. Veronica officinalis is an ex- 
tremely small flower rising on vertical stems out of re- 
cumbent leaves; and the drawing of it in the Flora 
Danica, which I mistook for a stunted northern state, is 
quite true of the English species,* except that it does 
not express the recumbent action of the leaves. The 
proper representation of ground-leafage has never yet 
been attempted in any botanical work whatever, and as, 
in recumbent plants, their grouping and action can only 
be seen from above, the plates of them should always 
have a dark and rugged background, not only to indicate 
the position of the eye, but to relieve the forms of the 

* The plate of Chamaedrys, D. 448, is also quite right, and not 
'too tall and weedlike,' as I have called it at p. 73. 



VI. MONACHA. Ill 

leaves as they were intended to be shown. I will try to 
give some examples in the course of this year. 

2. I find also, sorrowfully, that the references are 
wrong in three, if not more, places in that chapter. S. 
971 and 972 should be transposed in p. 72. S. 294 in 
p. 7-1 should be 98-i, D. 407 should be inserted after 
Peregrina, in p. 76 ; and 203, in fourth line from bottom 
of p. 78, should be 903. I wish it were likely that these 
errors had been corrected by my readers, — the rarity of 
the Flora Danica making at present my references virtu- 
ally useless : but I hope in time that our public institutes 
will possess themselves of copies : still more do I hope 
tliat some book of the kind will be undertaken by Eng- 
lish artists and engravers, which shall be worthy of our 
own country. 

3. Farther, I get into confusion by not always re- 
membering my own nomenclature, and have allowed 
' Gentianoides' to remain, for No. 16, though I banish 
Gentian. It -^all be far better to call this eastern moun- 
tain species ' Olympica ' : according to Sibthorpe's local- 
ization, " in summa parte, nive soluta, montis Olympi 
Bithyni,"' and the rather that Curtis's plate above re- 
ferred to shows it in luxuriance to be liker an asphodel 
than a gentian. 

4. I have also perhaps done wrong in considering 
Veronica polita and agrestis as only varieties, in JSTo. 3. 
No author tells me wliy the first is called polite, but its 
blue seems more intense than that of agrestis; and as it 



112 PKOSERPINA. 

is above described with attention, vol. i., p. 75, as an ex- 
ample of precision in flower-form, we niay as well re- 
tain it in our list here. It will be therefore onr twenty- 
ilrst variety, — it is Loudon's flfty-ninth and last. He 
translates 'polita' simply 'polished,' which is nonsense. 
I can think of nothing to call it but 'dainty,' and will 
leave it at present unchristened. 

5. Lastly. I can't think why I omitted V. Humifusa, 
S. 979, which seems to be quite one of the most beauti- 
ful of the family — a mountain flower also, and one which 
I ought to find here; but hitherto I know only among 
the mantlings of the ground, Y. thymifolia and offici- 
nalis. All these, however, ngree in the extreme pretti- 
ness and grace of their crowded leafage, — the officinalis, 
of which the leaves are shown much too coarsely serrated 
in S. 984, forming carpets of finished embroidery which 
I have never yet rightly examined, because I mistook 
them for St. John's wort. They are of a beautiful 
pointed oval form, serrated so finely that they seem 
smooth in distant effect, and covered with equally invisi- 
ble hairs, which seem to collect towards the edge in the 
variety Hirsuta, S. 985. 

For the present, I should like the reader to group the 
thi-ee flowers, S. 979, 984, 9S5, under the general name 
of Humifusa, and to distinguish them by a third epithet, 
which I allow myself when in difficulties, thus: 

Y. Humifusa, cserulea, the beautiful blue one, which 
resembles Spicata. 



VI. MONACHA. 113 

Y. Humifusa, officinalis, and, 

Y. Humifusa, liirsuta : the last seems to me extremelj 

interesting, and I hope to find it and study it 

carefull3^ 

Bj this arrangement we shall have only twenty-one 

species to remember : the one which chiefly decorates 

the ground again dividing into the above three. 

6. These matters being set right, I pass to the busi- 
ness in hand, which is to define as far as possible the 
subtle i-elations between the Yeronicas and Draconidae, 
and again between these and the tribe at present called 
labiate. In my classification above, vol. i., p. 200, the 
Draconidas include the Nightshades; but this was an 
oversight. Atropa belongs properlj' to the following 
class, Moiridse ; and my Draconids are intended to in- 
clude only the two great families of Personate and Rin- 
gent flowers, which in some degree resemble the head of 
an animal: the representative one being what we call 
'snapdragon,' but the French, careless of its snapping 
power, calf's muzzle — " Muflier, muflande, or muflie de 
Yeau." — Rousseau, 'Lettres,' p. 19. 

7. As I examine his careful and sensible plates of it, 
I chance also on a bit of his text, which, extremely wise 
and generally useful, I translate forthwith : — 

" I understand, my dear, that one is vexed to take so 
mucli trouble without learning the names of the plants 
one examines ; but I confess to you in good faith that 
it never entered into my plan to spare you this little 



114 PROSERPINA. 

chagrin. One pretends tliat Botany is nothing hut a 
science of words, which only exercises the memory, and 
only teaches how to give plants names. For me, I know 
no rational study which is only a science of words: and 
to which of the two, I pray yon, shall I grant the name 
of botanist, — to him Avho knows how to spit out a name 
or a phrase at the sight of a })lant, without knowing any- 
thing of its strnctui'e, or to him who, knowing that struc- 
ture very well, is ignorant nevertheless of the vei-y arbi- 
trary name that one gives to the plant in such and such a 
country? If we only gave to your children an amusing 
occupation, we should miss the best half of our puipose, 
which is, in amusing them, to exercise their intelligence 
and accustom them to attention. Before teaching them 
to name what thej' see, let us begin by teaching them to 
see it. That science, forgotten in all educations, ought 
to form the most important part of theirs. I can never 
repeat it often enough — teach them never to be satisfied 
with words, ("se payer de mots') and to hold themselves 
as knowing nothing of what has reached no farther than 
their memories." 

8. Rousseau chooses, to represent his ' Personees,' La 
Mufflaude, la Linaire, TEuphraise, la Pediculaire, la 
Crete-de-coq, TOrobanche, la Cimbalaire, la Velvote, la 
Digitale, giving plates of snapdragoti, foxglove, and 
Madonna-herb, (the Cimbalaire), and therefore including 
my entire class of Draconidre, whether open or close 
throated. But I propose myself to separate from them 



VI. MONACHA. 115 

the flower which, for the present, I have called Monacha, 
but may perhaps find liereafter a better name ; this one, 
Avliich is the best Latin I can lind for a nnn of tlie des- 
ert, being given to it because all tlie resemblance either 
to calf or dragon has ceased in its rosy petals, and they 
resemble — the lower ones those of the mountain thyme, 
and the upper one a softly crimson cowl or hood. 

9. This beautiful mountain flower, at present, by the 
good grace of botanists, known as Pedicularis, from a 
disease which it is supposed to give to sheep, is distin- 
guished from all other Draconidffi by its beautifully 
divided leaves : while the flower itself, like, as afoi'e- 
said, thyme in the three lower petals, rises in the upper 
one quite upright, and terminates in the narrow and 
peculiar hood from which I have named it ' Monacha.' 

10. Two deeper crimson spots with white centres ani- 
mate the colour of the lower petals in our mountain kind 
— mountain or morass ; — it is vilely drawn in S. 997 
under the name of Sylvatica, translated 'Procumbent'! 
As it is neither a wood flower nor a procumbent one,* 
and as its rosy colour is i-ai-e among morass flowers, I 
sliall call it simply MoTiacha Rosea. 

I have not the smallest notion of the meaning of the 

*" Stems numerous from the crown of the root-stock, tle-cum 
bent."— S. The effect of the flower upon the ground is always of 
an extremely upright and separate plant, never appearing in clusters, 
or in any relation to a central root. My epithet ' rosea ' does not 
deny its botanical de- or pro-cumbency. 



116 PEOSERPINA. 

following sentence in S. : — " Upper lip of corolla not 
rostrate, with the margin on each side fnrnished with a 
triangular tooth immediately below the apex, but with- 
out any tooth below the middle." Why, or when, a lip 
is rosti-ate, or has any ' tooth below the middle,' I do not 
know; but the upper petal of the corolla is hei"e a very 
close gathered hood, with the style emei'gent downwards, 
and the stamens all hidden and close set within. 

In this action of the upper petal, and curve of the 
style, the flower resembles the Labiates,* and is the 
proper link between them and the Draconidse. The 
capsule is said by S. to be oval-ovoid. As eggs always 
are oval, 1 don't feel farther informed by the epithet. 
The capsule and seed both are of entirely indescribable 
shapes, with any number of sides — very foxglove-like, 
and inordimitel}^ large. The seeds of the entire family 
are ' ovoid-subtrigonous.' — S. 

11. I find only two species given as British by S., 
namely, Sylvatica and Palustris ; but I take first for the 
Regina, the beautiful Arctic species D. 1105, Flora 
Suecica, 555. Tiose-coloured in the stem, pale piidc in 
the flowers (corollae pallide incarnatae), the calices furry 
against the cold, whence the present ugly name, Hirsuta. 
Only .on the highest crests of the Lapland Alps. 

(2) Rosea, D. 225, there called Sylvatica, as by S., 
presumably because " in pascuis subhumidis non rarae." 

* Compare especially Galeopsis Angustifolia, D. 3031. 



VI. MONACHA. 117 

Beautifully drawn, but, as I have desciibed it, vigorously 
erect, and with no decunibency whatever in any part of 
it. Koot branched, and enormous in proportion to plant, 
and I fancy therefore must be good for something if one 
knew it. But Gerarde, who calls the plant Red Rattle, 
(it having indeed much in common with the Yellow 
Rattle), says, *' It groweth in moist and moorish meadows ; 
the herbe is not only unprofitable, but likewise hurtful, 
and an infirmity of the meadows." 

(3) Palustris, D. 2055, S. 996 — scarcely any likeness 
between the plates. " Everywhere in the meadows," 
according to D. I leave the English name, Marsh 
Monacha, much doubting its being more marshy than 
others. 

12. I take next (4 and 5) two northern species, Lap- 
ponica, D. 2, and Gronlandica, D. 116G ; the first yellow, 
the second red, both beautiful. The Lap one has its 
divided leaves almost united into one lovely spear-shaped 
single leaf. The Greenland one has its red hood much 
prolonged in front. 

(6) Ramosa, also a Greenland species; yellow, very 
delicate and beautiful. Three stems from one root, but 
nuiy be more or fewer, I suppose. 

13. (7) Norvegica, a beautifully clustered golden 
flower, M'ith thick stem, D. 30, the only locality given 
being the Dovrefeldt. ''Alpina" and " Flammea" are 
the synonyms, but I do not know it on the Alps, and it 
is no more flame-coloured than a cowslip. 



118 PROSERPINA. 

.Botli the Lapland and Norwegian flowers are drawn 
with their steins wavy, though upright — a rai'e and 
pretty liabit of growth. 

14. (8) Suecica, D. 26, named awkv'ardly Sceptrum 
Carol inum, in honour of Charles XII. It is the largest 
of all the species drawn in D., aiid contrasts strikingly 
with (4) and (5) in the strict uprightness of its stem. 
The corolla is closed at the extremity, which is red ; 
the body of the flower pale yellow. Grows in marshy 
and shady woods, near Upsal. Linn., Flora Suecica, 
553. 

The many-lobed but united leaves, at the root Ave or 
six inches long, are irregularly beautiful. 

15. These eight species are all I can specify, having 
no pictures of the others named by Loudon, — eleven, 
making nineteen altogether, and I wish I could And a 
twentieth and draw them all, but the reader may be well 
satisfied if he clearly know these eight. Tlie group they 
form is an entirely distinct one, exactly intermediate 
between the Vestals and Draconids, and cannot be rightly 
attached to either; for it is Draconid in structure and 
affinity — Yestal in form— and I don't see how to get the 
Connection of the three families I'ightly exp~ressed witl^ 
out taking the Draconidse out of the groups belonging 
to the dark Koi-a, and ])laciiig them next the Vestals, 
with the Monachne between ; for indeed Linaria and 
sevei'al other Draconid forms are entirely innocent and 
beautiful, and even the Foxglove never docs any real 



VI. MONACHA. 119 

mischief like lieiiilock. wliile decorativelj it is one of the 
most precious of mountain flowers. I find myself also 
embarrassed by my name of Vestals, because of the 
masculine groups of Basil and Tliymus, and I think it 
■will be better to call them simply Menthse, and to place 
tliem with tlie other cottnge-garden plants not yet 
classed, taking the easily i-emembered names Mentha, 
Monacha, Draconida. This will leave me a blank 
seventh place among niy twelve orders at p. 194, vol. i,, 
which I thiidc I shall fill by taking cyclamen and ana- 
gillis out of the Primulaceoe, and making a separate 
group of them. These retouchings and changes are in- 
evitable in a work confessedly tentative and suggestive 
only ; but in whatever state of imperfection I may be 
forced to leave 'Proserpina,' it will assuredly be found, 
up to the point reached, a better foundation for the 
knowledge of flowers in the minds of young people than 
any hitherto adopted system of nomenclature. 

16. Taking then this re-arranged group, Mentha, 
Monacha, and Draconida, as a sufliciently natural and 
convenient one, I will briefly give the essentially botani- 
cal relations of the three families. 

Mentha and Monacha agree in being essentially hooded 
flowers, the upper petal more or less taking the form of 
a cup, helmet or hood, which conceals the tops of the 
stamens. Of the three lower petals, the lowest is almost 
invariably the longest ; it sometimes is itself divided 
again into two, but may be best thought of as single, and 



120 PROSERPINA. 

witli tlie two lateral ones, distinguished in the Menthae 
as the apron and the side pockets. 

Plate XII. represents the most characteristic types of 
the blossoms of Menthae, in the profile and front views, 
all a little magnified. The upper two are white basil, 
purple spotted — growing here at Brantwood always with 
two terminal flowers. Tlie two middle figures are the 
purple-spotted dead nettle, Lamium maculatum ; and 
the two lower, thyme : but I have not been able to draw 
these as I wanted, the perspectives of the petals being 
too difiicult, and inexplicable to the eye even in the 
flowers themselves without continually putting them in 
changed positions. 

17. The Menthse are in their structure essentially 
quadrate plants; their stems are square, their leaves 
opposite, their stamens either four or two, their seeds 
two-carpeled. But their calices are five-sepaled, falling 
into divisions of two and three ; and the flowers, though 
essentiall}' four-petaled, may divide either the upper or 
lower petal, or both, into two lobes, and so present a six- 
lobed outline. The entire plants, but chiefly the leaves, 
are nearly always fragrant, and alwaj'S innocent. None 
of them sting, none priclc, and none poison. 

18. The -Draconids, easily recognizable by their as- 
pect, are botanically indefinable with any clearness or 
simplicity. The calyx may be five- or four-sepaled ; the 
corolla, five- or four-lobed ; the stamens may be tv.^o, 
four, four with a rudimentary fifth, or five with the two 



VI. MONACHA. 121 

anterior ones longer than the other three ! The capsule 
may open by two, three, or four valves, — or bj pores ; 
the seeds, generally numerous, are somethues solitary, 
and the leaves may be alternate, opposite, or verticillate. 
19. Thus licentious in structure, they are also doubt- 
ful in disposition. None that I know of are fragrant, 
few useful, many more or less malignant, and some para- 
sitic. The following piece of a friend's letter almost 
makes me regret my rescue of them from the dark king- 
dom of Kora : — 

"... And I find that the Monacha Kosea (Red Rattle is its name, 
besides the ugly one) is a perennial, and several of the other draconi- 
diE, foxglove, etc. , are biennials, born this year, flowering and dying 
next year, and the size of roots is generally proportioned to the life 
of plants ; except when artificial cultivation develops the root special- 
ly, as in turnips, etc. Several of the Draconidse are parasites, and 
suck the roots of other plants, and have only just enough of their own 
to catch with. The Yellow Rattle is one ; it clings to the roots of 
the grasses and clovers, and no cultivation will make it thrive without 
them. My authority for this last fact is Grant Allen ; but I have ob- 
served for myself that the Yellow Rattle has very small white suck- 
ing roots, and no eai'th sticking to them. The tooth worts and broom 
rapes are Draconidoe, I think, and wholly parasites. Can it be that 
the Red Rattle is the one member of the family that has ' proper pride, 
and is self supporting ' ? the others are mendicant orders. We had 
what we choose to call the Dorcas flower show yesterday, and we gave, 
as usual, prizes for wild flower bouquets. I tried to find out the lo- 
cal names of several flowers, but they all seemed to be called ' I 
don't know, ma'am.' I would not allow this name to suffice for the 
red poppy, and I said ' This red flower must be called something — tell 
me what you call it ? ' A few of the audience answered ' Blind Eyes.' 



123 PROSERPINA. 

Is it because they have to do with sleep that they are called Blind 
Eyes — or because they are dazzling ?" 

20. I think, certainly, from the dazzling, which some- 
times with the poppj, scarlet geranium, and nasturtium, 
is more distinctly oppressive to the eye than a real excess 
of light. 

I will certainly not include among my rescued Dracon- 
idse, the parasitic Lathraea and Orobanche ; and cannot 
yet make certain of any minor classification among those 
which I retain, — but, uniting Bartsia with Euphrasia, I 
shall have, in the main, the three divisions Digitah's, Lin- 
aria, Euphrasia, and probably separate the moneyworts 
as links with Yeronica, and Rhinanthus as links with 
Lathraea. 

And as I shall certainly be unable this summer, under 
the pressure of resumed work at Oxford, to spend time 
in any new botanical investigations, I will rather try to 
fulfil the promise given in the last number, to collect 
what little I have been able hitherto to describe or ascer- 
tain, respecting the higher modes of tree structure. 



CHAPTEE YIL 

SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 

[The following chapter has been written six years. It was delayed 
in order to complete the promised clearer analysis of stem-struct- 
ure ; which, after a great deal of chopping, chipping, and peeling of 
my oaks and birches, came to reverently hopeless pause. What is 
here done may yet have some use in pointing out to younger students 
how they may simplify their language, and direct their thoughts, so 
as to attain, in due time, to reverent hope.] 

1. The most generally useful book, to myself, hither- 
to, in such little time as I have for reading about plants, 
has been Lindley's ' Ladies' Botany ' ; but the most rich 
and true I have yet found in illustration, the ' Histoire 
des Plantes,' * by Louis Figuier. I should like those of 
my readers who can afford it to buy both these books ; 
the first nrjiicd, at any rate, as I shall always refer to it 
for structural drawings, and on points of doubtful classifi- 
cation ; while the second contains much general knowl- 
edge, expressed with some really human intelligence and 
feeling ; besides some good and singularly just history 
of botanical discovery and tlie men who guided it. The 
botanists, indeed, tell me proudly, " Figuier is no author- 

* Octavo : Paris, Hachette, 1S6D. 



124 PKOSERPINA. 

itj." But who wants authointj ! Is there nothing known 
yet about plants, then, which can be taught to a boy or 
girl, without referring them to an ' authority ' ? 

1. for my own part, care only to gather what Figuier 
can teach concerning things visible, to any boy or girl, 
who live within reach of a bramble hedge, or a hawthorn 
thicket, and can find authority enough for what they are 
told, in the sticks of them. 

2. If only lie would, or could, tell us clearly that much ; 
but like other doctors, though with better meaning than 
most, he has learned mainly to look at things with a 
microscope, — rarely with his eyes. And I am sorry to 
see, on re-reading this chapter of my own, which is little 
more than an endeavour to analyze and arrange the state- 
ments contained in his second, that I have done it more 
petulantly and unkindly than I ought ; but I can't do all 
the work over again, now, — more's the pity. I have not 
looked at this chapter for a year, and shall be sixty be- 
fore I know where I am ; — (I find myself, instead, now, 
sixty -four !) 

3. But I stand at once partly corrected in this second 
chapter of Figuier' s, on the 'Tige,' French from the 
Latin 'Tignum,' which 'authorities' say is again from 
the Sanscrit, and means 'the thing hewn with an axe' ; 
anyhow it is modern French for what we are to call the 
stem (§ 12, p. 136). 

" The tige," then, begins M. Louis, " is the axis of the 
ascending system of a vegetable, and it is garnished at 



Vir. SCIENCE -IN HER CELLS. 125 

intervals with vital knots, (eyes,) from which spring 
leaves and buds, disposed in a perfeetlj regular order. 
The root presents nothing of the kind. This character 
permits us always to distinguish, in the vegetable axis, 
what belongs really to the stem, and what to the 
root." 

4. Yes; and that is partly a new idea to me, for in 
this power of assigning their order for the leaves, the 
stem seems to take a royal or commandant character, and 
cannot be merely defined as the connexion of the leaf 
vrith the roots. 

In it is put the spirit of determination. One cannot 
fancy the little leaf, as it is born, determining the point 
it will be born at : the governing stem must determine 
that for it. Also the disorderliness of the root is to be 
noted for a condition of its degradation, no less than its 
love, and need, of Darkness. 

IS^or was I quite right (above, § 15, p. 139) in calling 
the stem itself ' spiral ' : it is itself a straight-growing 
rod, but one which, as it grows, lays the buds of future 
leaves round it in a spiral order, like the bas-relief on 
Trajan's column. 

I go on with Figuier : the next passage is very valua- 
ble. 

5. "The tige is the part of plants which, directed 
into the air, supports, and gives growing power to, the 
branches, the twigs, the leaves, and the flowers. The 
form, strength, and direction of the tige depend on the 



126 ' PROSERPINA. 

part that each plant lias to play among the vast vegetable 
population of our globe. Plants which need for their 
life a pure and often-renewed air, are borne by a straight 
tige, robust and tall, AVhen they have need only of a 
moist air, more condensed, and more rarely renewed, 
when they have to creep on the ground or glide in thick- 
ets, the tiges are long, flexible, and dragging. If they 
are to float in the air, sustaining themselves on more ro- 
bust vegetables, they are provided with flexible, slender, 
and supple tiges." 

6. Yes; but in that last sentence he loses hoJa^of his 
main idea, and to me the important one. — namely, the 
connexion of the form of stem with the quality of the 
air it requires. And that idea itself is at present vague, 
though most valuable, to me. A strawberry creeps, Mith 
a flexible stem, but requires certainly no less jiure air 
than a wood-fungus, which stands up straight. And in 
our own hedges and woods, are the wild rose and honey- 
suckle signs of unwholesome air ? 

" And honeysuckle loved to crawl 
Up the lone crags and ruined wall. 
I deemed such nooks the sweetest shade 
The sun in all his round surveyed." 

It seems to me, in the nooks most haunted by honeysuckle 
in my own wood, that the reason for its twining is a very 
feminine one, — that it likes to twine; and that all these 
whys and wherefores resolve themselves at last into — 



VII. SCIEXCE IN HER CELLS. 137 

Avluit a modern pliilosoplier, of course, cannot understand 
— caprice.* 

7. Fartlier on, Figuier, quoting St. Ililaire, tells us, 
^ of the creepers in primitive forests, — " Some of them 

resemble waving ribands, others coil themselves and de- 
scribe vast spirals ; the}'' droop in festoons, they wind 
hither and thither among the trees, they fling themselves 
from one to another, and form masses of leaves and flow- 
ers in which the observer is often at a loss to discover on 
which plant each sevei'al blossom grows." 

For all this, the real reasons will be known onlj^ when 
human beings become reasonable. For, except a curious 
naturalist or wistful missionaiy, no Christian has trodden 
the labyrinths of delight and decay among these garlands, 
but men who had no other thought than how to cheat 
their savage people out of their gold, and give them gin 
and smallpox in exchange. But, so soon as true servants 
of Heaven shall enter these Edens, and the Spirit of God 
enter with them, another spirit will also be breathed into 
the physical air; and the stinging insect, and venomous 
snake, and poisonous tree, pass away before the power of 
the i-egenerate human soul. 

8. At length, on the structure of the tiofe, Fio-uier 
begins his real M'ork, thus: — 

"A a:lance of the eve. thi'own on the section of a loir 
of wood destined for wai'ining, pei'niits us to I'ecognize 

* See in the ninth chapter what I have been able, since this sentence 
was written, to notice on the matter in question. 



128 PROSEEPINA. 

that the tige of the trees of oar forests presents three 
essential parts, wliich are, in going from witliin to with- 
out, tlie pith, tlie wood, and tlie bark. The pith, (in 
French, marrow,) forms a sort of cohimn in the centre 
of the woody axis. In very thick and ohl stems its di- 
ameter appeai-s very little ; and it has even for a long 
time been supposed that the marrow ends by disappear- 
ing altogether from tlie stems of old trees. But it does 
nothing of the sort ;* and it is now ascertained, by exact 
measures, that its diameter remains sensibly invariablef 
from tlie moment when the young woody axis begins to 
consolidate itself, to the epoch of its most complete de- 
velopment." 

So far, so good ; but what does he mean by the com- 
plete development of the young woody axis? When 
does the axis become ' wooden,' and how far np the tree 
does he call it an axis? If the stem divides into three 
branches, which is the axis ? And is the pith in the 
trunk no thicker than in each branch? 

9. He proceeds to tell us, '" The marrow is formed by 
a reunion of cells." — Yes, and so is Newgate, and so was 
the Bastille. But what does it matter whether the mar- 
row is made of a reunion of cells, or cellai's, or walls, or 

* I envy the French their generalized form of denial, ' II n'en est 
rien.' 

f ' Sensiblement invariable ; ' ' unchanged, so far as ice can see,' or 
to general sense ; microscopic and minute change not being consid- 
ered. 



VII. SCIENCE IN" HER CELLS. 



129 



floors, or ceilings ? I want to know what's the use of it? 
M'liy doesn't it grow bigger with the rest of the tree? 
M'hen does tlie tree^ consolidate itself ? when is it finally 
consolidated? and how can there be always marrow in it 
wlien the weary frame of its age remains a mere scarred 
tower of war with the elements, full of dnst and bats? 
'He will tell you if only you go on patiently,' thinks 




Fig. 24. 



the reader. He will not! Once your modern botanist 
gets into cells, he stays in them. Hear how he goes on ! 
• — ''This cell is a sort of sack; this sack is completely 
closed ; sometimes it is empty, sometimes it" — is full? — 
no, that would be unscientific simplicit}^: sometimes it 
" conceals a matter in its interior." " The marrow of 
young trees, such as it is represented in Figure 24 (Fi- 
guier. Figs. 38, 39, p. 42), is nothing else"— (indeed !) — 



130 PROSERPINA. 

" than ;\n aggregation of cells, which, first of spherical 
form, have become polyhedric by their increase and mu- 
tual compression." 

10. Now these figures, 38 and 39, wliich profess to 
represent this change, show us sixteen oval cells, sucli as 
vxt A, (Fig. 2-i) enlarged into thirteen lai-ger, and flattisli, 
hexagons ! — B, placed at a totally different angle. 

And before I can give you the figure revised with any 
available accuracy, I must know why or how the cells are 
enlarged, and in what direction. 

Do their walls lengthen laterally when they are empty, 
or does the ' matiere ' inside stuff them more out, (itself 
increased from what sources ?) when they are full ? In 
either case, during this change from circle to hexagon, is 
the marrow getting thickej' without getting longer? If 
so, the change in the angle of the cells is intentional, and 
probably is so; but the number of cells should have been 
the same : and further, the term ' liexagonal ' can oidy be 
applied to the section of a tubular cell, as in lioneycomb, 
so that the floor and ceiling of our pith cell are left un- 
described. 

11. Having got thus much of (partly conjectural) idea 
of the mechanical structure of marrow, here follows the 
solitai-y vital, or mortal, fact in the whole business, given 
in one crushing sentence at the close : — 

" The medullary tissue*' (first time of using this fine 
phrase for the marrow, — \vhy can't he say marrowy tis- 
sue — ' tissue moelleuse ' ?) " appears very early struck with 



VII. SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 131 

atony," ('atonie,' want of tone.) " above all, in its cen- 
tral parts." And so ends all he has to say for the pres- 
ent abont the marrow ! and it never appears to occur to 
him for a moment, that if indeed the noblest trees live 
all their lives in a state of healthy and robust paralysis, 
it is a distinction, hitherto unheard of, between vegeta- 
bles and animals ! 

12. Two pnges farther on, however, (p. 45,) we get 
more about the marrow, and of great interest, — to this 
effect, for I must abstract and complete here, instead of 
translating. 

'•The marrow itself is surrounded, as the centre of an 
electric cable is, by its guarding threads — that is to say, 
by a number of cords or threads coming between it and 
the wood, and differing from all others in the tree. 

"The entire protecting cylinder composed of them has 
been called the ' etui,' (or needle-case,) of the marrow. 
But each of the cords which together form this etui, is 
itself composed of an almost iniinitely delicate thread 
twisted into a screw, like the common spring of a letter- 
weigher or a Jack-in-the-box, but of exquisite fineness." 
Upon this, two pages and an elaborate figure are given 
^to these 'trachees' — tracheas, the French call them, — 
and we are never told the measure of them, either in di- 
ameter or length,* and still less, the use of them ! 

* Moreover, the confusion between vertical and horizontal sections 
in pp. 46, 47, is completed by the misprint of vertical for horizontal 
in the third line of p. 43, and of horizontal fpr vertical in the fifth 



132 PROSERPINA. 

I collect, however, in my thoughts, what I have 
learned thus far, 

13. A tree stem, it seems, is a growing thing, cracked 
outside, because its skin won't stretch, paralysed inside, 
because its marrow won't grow, but which continues the 
process of its life somehow, bj knitted nerves without 
any nervous energy in them, protected by spiral spi'ings 
without any spring in them. 

Stay — I am going too fast. That coiling is perhaps 
prepared for some kind of uncoiling; and I will try if I 
can't learn something about it from some other 'book — 
noticing, as I pause to think where to look, the advan- 
tage of our English tongue in its pithy Saxon word, 
' pith,' separating all our ideas of vegetable structure 
clearly from animal ; while the poor Latin and French 
must use the entirely inaccurate words 'medulla' and 
'moelle'; all, however, concurring in their recognition 
of a vital power of some essential kind in this Nvhite cord 
of cells: "Medulla, sive ilia vitalis anima est, ante se 
tendit, longitudinem impellens." (Pliny, ' Of the Yine,' 
liber X., cap. xxi.) 'Yitalis anima' — yes — that I ac- 
cept; but 'longitudinem impellens,' I pause at; being 
not at all clear, yet, myself, about any impulsive power 
in the pith.* 

line from bottom of p. 46; while Figure 45 is to me totally unintelli- 
gible, this being, as far as can be made out by the lettering, a section 
of a tree stem which has its marrow on the outside ! 
* " Try a bit of rhubarb" (says A, who sends me a pretty drawing 



VII. SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 133 

1-i. However, 1 take U]) first, and with best hope, Dr. 
Asa Gray, who tells me (Art. 211) that pith consists of 
parenchA'ina, 'which is at first gorged Mnth sap,' but that 
man}' stems expand so rapidly that their pith is torn into 
a mere lining or into horizontal plates; and that as the 
stem grows older, the pitli becomes dry and light, and is 
' then of no farther use to the plant.' But of what use 
it ever was, we are not informed ; and the Doctor makes 
US his bow, so far as the professed article on pith goes ; 
but, farther on, I find in his account of ' Sap-wood,' (Ai't. 
224,) that in tiie germinating plantlet, the sap 'ascends 
first through the parenchyma, especially through its cen- 
tral portion or pith.' AVhereby we are led back to our 
old question, what sap is, and where it comes from, with 
the now superadded question, whether the young pith is 
a mere succulent sponge, or an active power, and con- 
structive mechanism, nourished by the abundant sap : as 
Columella has it, — 

''Natural! enim spiritii omne alimentum virentis quasi 
quaedam anima, per medullam trunci veluti per siplio- 
iiem, trahitur in summum." * 

As none of these authors make any mention of a com- 

of rhubarb pith); but as rhubarb does not grow into wood, inappli- 
cable to our present subject; and if we descend to annual plants, rush 
pith is the thing to be examined. 

* I am too lazy now to translate, and shall trust to the chance of 
some remnant, among my readers, of classical study, even in modern 
England. 



134 PROSERPINA. 

munication between the cells of the pith, I conclude 
that the sap they are filled with is taken np by them, and 
used to construct their own thickening tissue. 

15. Next, I take Balfour's ' Structural Botanj,' and by 
his index, under the word 'Pith,' am referred to liis 
articles 8, 72, and 75. In article 8, neither the word 
pith, nor any expression alluding to it, occui'S. 

In article 72, the stem of an outlaid tree is defined as 
consisting of ' pith, fiijro-vascular and * woody tissue, 
medullary rays, bark, and epidermis.' 

A more detailed statement follows, illustrated by a 
figure surrounded by twenty-three letters — namely, two 
h s, three c s, four e s, three /"s, one I, four m s, three ^ s, 
one r, and two -ys. 

Eighteen or twenty minute sputters of dots may, with 
a good lens, be discerned to proceed from this alphabet, 
and to stop at various points, or lose themselves in the 
texture, of the represented wood. And, knowing now 
something of the matter beforehand, guessing a little 
more, and gleaning the rest with my finest glass, I 
achieve the elucidation of the figure, to the following 
extent, explicable without letters at all, by my more sim- 
ple drawing, Figure 25. 

16. (1) The inner circle full of little cells, diminishing 
in size towards the outside, represents the pith, ' very 
large at this period of the growth' — (the first 3'ear, we 

* ' Or woody tissue,' suggests A. It is ' and ' in Balfour. 



VII. SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 



135 



are told in next page,) and ' very large ' — he means in 
proportion to tlie rest of the branch. How large he 
does not say, in his text, but states, in his note, that the 
figure is magnified 26 diameters. I have drawn mine by 
the more convenient multiplier of 30, and given the real 




Fig. 25. 



size at B, according to Balfour : — but without believing 
liiin to be right, I never saw a maple stern of the first 
year so small. 

(2) The black band with wiiite dots round the mar- 
row, represents the marrow-sheath. 

(3) From the marrow-sheath run the raarrow-rays 



136 PROSERPINA. 

'dividing the vascular circle into numerous compact 
segments.' A ' raj ' cannot divide anything into a seg- 
ment. Only a partition, or a knife, can do that. But 
we shall find presently that marrow r^ys ought to be 
called nmvvow -jjlaies, and are really mural, forming more 
or less continuous partitions. 

(4) The compact segments 'consist of woodj^ vessels 
and of porous vessels.' This is the first Ave have heard 
of Avoody vessels/ He means the ^fibres ligncux' of 
Figuier; and represents them in each compartment, as 
at C (Fig. 25), without telling us wlij^ he draws the 
Avoody vessels as radiating. Tlie\' appear to radiate, in- 
deed, wlien wood is sawn across, but they are really up- 
right. 

(5) A moist layer of greenish cellular tissue called the 
cambium laj'er — black in Figure 25 — and he di'aws it in 
flat arches, without saying why. 

(6) "") Three layers of bark. (called in his note Endo- 

(7) \ phloeiim, Mesophloeum, and Epiphloeum !) with 

(8) J ' laticiferous vessels.' * 

(9) Epidermis. The three layers of bark being sepa- 
rated by single lines, I indicate the epidermis by a 
double one, with a rough fringe outside, and thus we 
have the parts of the section clearly vasible and distinct 

* Terms not used now, but others quite as bad : Cuticle, Epidermis, 
Cortical layer. Periderm, Cambium, Phelloderm — six hard words for 
' Bark,' says my careful annotator. " Yes ; and these new six to be 
changed for six newer ones next year, no doubt." 



VII. SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 137 

for discussion, so far as this first figure goes, — without 
wanting one letter of all his three and twenty ! 

17. But on the next page, this ingenious author gives 
us a new figure, which professes to represent the same 
order of things in a longitudinal section ; and in retrac- 
ing that order sideways, instead of looking down, he not 
only introduces new terms, but misses one of his old lay- 
ers in doing so, — thus : 

His order, in explaining Figure 96, contains, as above, 
nine members of the tree stem. 

But his order, in explaining Figure 97, contains only 
eight, thus : 

(1) The pith. > ^.^^,^^_ 

(2) Medullary sheath, i 

(3) Medullary ray = a Radius. 

(4) Vascular zone, with woody fibres (not now ves- 
sels !) The fibres are composed of spiral, annular, pitted, 
and other vessels. 

(5) Inner bark or 'liber,' with layer of cambium 
cells. 

(6) Second layer of bark, or ' cellular envelope,' with 
laticiferous vessels. 

(7) Outer or tuberous layer of bark. 

(8) Epidermis. 

Doing the best I can to get at the muddle-headed gen- 
tleman's meaning, it appears, by the lettering of his 
Figure 97, my 25 above, that the ' liber,' number 5, con- 
tains the cambium layer in the middle of it. The part 



138 



PROSERPIiq-A. 



of the liber between the cambiura and the wood is not 

marked in Figure d6 ; — but the cambium is number 5, 

and the liber outside of it is number 6, — the Endophloeum 

of his note. 

Having got himself into this piece of lovely confusion, 

he proceeds to give a figure of the wood in the second 
year, which I think he has bor- 
rowed, without acknowledgment, 
from Figuier, omitting a piece 
of Figuier's woodcut which is 
unexplained in Figuier's text. I 
will spare my readers the work 
I have had to do, in order to get 
the statements on either side 
clarified : but I think they will 
find, if they care to work through 
the wilderness of the two au- 
thors' wits, that this which fol- 
lows is the sum of what they have 
effectively to tell us ; with the 
collated list of the main questions 

they leave unanswered — and, worse, unasked. 

18. An ordinary tree branch, in transverse section, 

consists essentially of three parts only, — the Pith, Wood, 

and Bark. 

The i3ith is in full animation during the first year — 

that is to say, during the actual shooting of the wood. 

We are left to infer that in the second year, the pith of 




Fig. 26. 



Vir. SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 139 

the tlien unprogressive shoot becomes collective only, 
not formative ; and that the pith of the new shoot vir- 
tually energizes tlie new wood in its deposition beside 
the old one. Thus, let a 5, Figure 26, be a shoot of tlie 
first year, and h c oi the second. The pith remains of the 
same thickness in both, but that of the new shoot is, I 
suppose, chiefly active in sending down the new wood to 
thicken the old one, which is collected, however, and 
fastened by the extending pith-rays below. You see^ I 
have given each shoot four fibres of wood for its owli ; 
then the four fibres of the upper one send out two 
to thicken the lower : the pith-rays, represented by 
the white transverse claws, catch and gather all to- 
gether. Mind, I certify nothing of this to you ; but if 
this do not happen, — let the botanists tell you what 
does. 

19. Secondly. The wood, represented by these four 
lines, is to be always remembered as consisting of fibres 
and vessels ; therefore it is called ' vascular,' a word 
which you may as well remember (though rarely needed 
in familiar English), with its roots, v«5, a vase, and vas- 
culum, a little vase or phial. ' Yascule' may sometimes 
be allowed in botanical descriptions where •" cell ' is not 
clear enough ; thus, at present, we find our botanists 
calling the pith ' cellular ' but the wood ' vascular,' with, 
I think, the implied meaning that a ' vascule,' little or 
large, is a long thing, and has some liquid in it, while a 
'cell' is a more or less round thing, and to be supposed 



140 



PROSERPINA. 



empty, unless described as full. But what liquid tills 
the vascules of the wood, they do not tell 
us.* I assume that they absorb water, as 
long as the tree lives. 

20. Wood, whether vascular or fibrous, is 
however formed, in outlaid plants, first out- 
side of the pith, and then, in shoots of the 
second year, outside of the wood of the first, 
and in the third year, outside of the wood of 
the second ; so that supposing the quantity of 
wood sent down from the growing shoot 
distributed on a flat plane, the structure in 
the third year would be as in Figure 27. 
But since the new wood is distributed all 
round the stem, (in successive cords or 
threads, if not at once), the increase of sub- 
stance after a year or two would be untraceable, unless more 
shoots than one were formed at the extremity of the 
branch. Of actual bud and branch structure, I gave intro- 
ductory account long since in the fifth volume of ' Modern 
Painters.' f to which I would now refer the reader ; but 

* " At first the vessels are pervious and full ofjluid, but by degrees 
thickening layers are deposiled, which contract their canal." — BAii- 

FOUR. 

f I cannot better this earlier statement, which in beginning ' Proser- 
pina,' I intended to form a part of that work ; but, as readers already 
in possession of it in the original form, ought not to be burdened with 
its repetition, I shall republish those chapters as a supplement, which 
I trust may be soon issued. 




Fig. 27. 



Vir. SCIENCE IN HER CELLS. 141 

both then, and to-day, after twenty years' further time 
allowed me, I am unable to give the least explanation of 
the mode in which the wood is really added to the in- 
terior stem. I cannot find, even, whether this is mainly 
done in springtime, or in the summer and autumn, when 
the young suckers form on the wood ; but my impres- 
sion is that though all the several substances are added 
annually, a little more pith going to the edges of the pith- 
plates, and a little more bark to the bark, with a great 
deal more wood to the wood, — there is a different or at 
least successive period for each deposit, the carrying all 
these elements to their places involving a fineness of basket 
work or web work in the vessels, which neither microscope 
nor dissecting tool can disentangle. The result on the 
whole, however, is practically that we have, outside the 
wood, always a mysterious 'cambium layer,' and then 
some distinctions in the bark itself, of which we must 
take separate notice. 

21. Of Cambium, Dr. Gray's 220th article gives the 
following account. " It is not a distinct substance, but 
a layer of delicate new cells full of sap. The inner por- 
tion of the cambium layer is, therefore, nascent wood, 
and the outer nascent bark. As the cells of this layer 
multiply, the greater number lengthen vertically into 
prosenchyma^ or woody tissue, while some are trans- 
formed into ducts" (wood vessels?) "and others remain- 
ing 2i^ jparencTiyma^ continue the medullary rays, or com- 
mence new ones." Nothing is said here of the part of 



143 PKOSEKPINA. 

the cambium which becomes bark : but at page 128, the 
thin walled cells of the bark are said to be those of ordi- 
nary ' parenchyma,' and in the next page a very import- 
ant passage occurs, which must have a paragraph to 
itself. I close the present one with one more protest 
against the entirely absurd terms ' par-enchyma,' for com- 
mon cellular tissue, ' pros-enchyma,' for cellular tissue 
with longer cells ; — ' cambium ' for an early state of hoth^ 
and ' diachyma ' for a peculiar position of one ! * while the 
chemistry of all these substances is wholly neglected, and 
we have no idea given us of any difference in pith, wood, 
and bark, than that they are made of short or long — 
young or old — cells ! 

22. But in Dr. Gray's 230th article comes this passage 
of real value. (Italics mine — all.) ""While the newer 
layers of the wood abound in crude sap, which they con- 
vey to the leaves, those of the inner bark abound in 
elaborated sap, which they receive from the leaves^ and 
convey to the camVtum layer, or zone of groivth. The 
proper juices and peculiar products of plants are accord- 
ingly found in the foliage and bark, especially the latter. 
In the bark, therefore, either of the stem or root, medi- 
cinal and other principles are usually to be sought, rather 

* " ' Diachyma ' is parenchyma in the middle of a leaf !" (Balfour, 
Art. 137.) Henceforward, if I ever make botanical quotations, I shall 
always call parenchyma, By-tis ; prosenchjTiia, To-tis ; and diachyma, 
Through -tis, short for By- tissue, To-tissue, and Through -tissue— then 
the student will see what all this modern wisdom comes to I 



VIT. SCIENCE IN HEK CELLS. 143 

than in the wood. Nevertheless, as the wood is kept in 
connection with the bark by the medullary rays, many 
products which probably originate in the former are de- 
posited in the wood." ^ 

23. Now, at last, I see my way to useful summary of 
the whole, which I had better give in a separate chapter : 
and will try in future to do the preliminary work of 
elaboration of tb.e sap from my authorities, above shown, 
in its process, to the reader, without making so much 
fuss about it. But, I think in tins case, it was desirable 
that the floods of pros-, par-, peri-, dia-, and circumlocu- 
tion, through which one has to wade towards any emer- 
gent crag of fact in modern scientific books, should for 
once be seen in the wasteful tide of them; that so I 
mio-ht finally pray the younger students who feel, or re- 
member, their disastrous sway, to cure themselves for 
ever of the fatal habit of imagining that they know more 
of anything after naming it unintelligibly, and thinking 
about it impudently, than they did by loving sight of its 
nameless being, and in wise confession of its boundless 
mystery. 

In re-reading the text of this number I find a few er- 
rata, noted below, and can besides secure my young read- 
ers of some things left doubtful, as, for instance, in their 
acceptance of the word ' Monacha,' for the flower described 
in the sixth chapter. I have used it now habitually too 
long to part with it myself, and I think it will be found 



144 PROSERPIIfA. 

serviceable and jjleasurable by others. Neither shall I 
now change the position of the Draconic! ce, as snggested 
at p. 118, but keep all as first j)lanned. See among other 
reasons for doing so the letter quoted in p. 121. 

I also add to the plate originalh' prepared for this num- 
ber, one showing the effect of Veronica officinalis in deco- 
ration of foreground, merely by its green leaves ; see the 
paragraphs 1 and 5 of Chapter YI. I have not repre- 
sented the fine serration of the leaves, as they are quite 
invisible from standing height : the book should be laid 
on the floor and looked down on, without stooping, to 
see the eifect intended. And so I gladly close this long- 
lagging number, hoping never to write such a tiresome 
chapter as this again, or to make so long a pause between 
any readable one and its sequence. 

p. 105, 1. 1, for ' love ' read ' be loved.' 
p. 105, 1. 3, put a semicolon, instead of comma, after 'it.' 
p. 113, 1. 9 from bottom, put 'calf's muzzle' in inverted commas, 
p. 115, ' never appearing in clusters ' ; I meant, in close masses. It 
forms exquisite little rosy crowds, on ground that it likes. 



